Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate explained

The voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , alternatively but unofficially (entity 680), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ts\. The voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate occurs in such languages as Mandarin Chinese, Croatian and Serbian.

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate:

• Its manner of articulation is sibilant affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then directing it through a groove in the tongue and over the sharp edge of the teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.
• Its place of articulation is alveolo-palatal, that is, palatalized laminal postalveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate.
• Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Bosnian		Bosnian: [[Bosnian alphabet|''ste'''ć'''ak'']]		'Stećak'
Catalan		Catalan; Valencian: [[Catalan orthography|''fle'''tx'''a'']]		'arrow'	See Catalan phonology
Chinese	Mandarin	Chinese: [[Chinese characters|北京]]/Chinese: [[Hanyu Pinyin|''Běi'''j'''īng'']]		'Beijing'	Contrasts with aspirated form. See Standard Mandarin
Croatian		Croatian: [[Croatian alphabet|''i'''ć'''i'']]		'to go'
Japanese		Japanese: [[kanji|知人]]/Japanese: [[Romanization of Japanese|'''''ch'''ijin'']]		'acquaintance'	See Japanese phonology
Korean		잘/Korean: [[Revised Romanization of Korean|'''''j'''al'']]		'well'	See Korean phonology
Polish		Polish: [[Polish orthography|'''''ć'''ma'']]		'moth'	See Polish phonology
Russian		Russian: [[Russian orthography|'''ч'''уть]]		'narrowly'	See Russian phonology
Serbian		Serbian: [[Cyrillic alphabet|Лов'''ћ'''ен]]/Serbian: [[Latin alphabet|''Lov'''ć'''en'']]		'Lovćen'
Thai		Thai: [[Thai script|ฉัน]]		'I' (informal)
Vietnamese		Vietnamese: [[Vietnamese alphabet|'''ch'''a]]		'Father dad'	See Vietnamese phonology

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Notes and References