Aspiration
Aspiration is a feature in languages where saying a consonant gives out a puff of air. For example, if you dangle a piece of paper in front of your mouth, you will see it move if you say an aspirated, or breathy, consonant. If the paper does not move, the consonant it is unaspirated, or not breathy. In English, voiceless stops and fricatives the beginning of a word are aspirated, which are the sounds 'p', 't', 'k', and 'ch' (which are written as /p/, /t/, /k/, /t͡ʃ/ in the IPA in the same order).
In the IPA, aspirated sounds can be written with an ʰ symbol afterwards, as in /pʰ/, /tʰ/, /kʰ/, and /t͡ʃʰ/. For example, the first sound in the words "pick", "tick", "kick", and "chick" are aspirated. In IPA, they are written as /pʰɪk/, /tʰɪk/, /kʰɪk/, and /t͡ʃʰɪk/ in the same order.
However, voiceless stops and fricatives that appear after the first sound are unaspirated. For example, while the /p/ in "pit" is aspirated, the /p/ in "spit" and the /p/ in "tip" are not, so they would not be marked with an ʰ symbol afterwards. Below are more examples of aspiration.
| English word | IPA form |
|---|---|
| pit | /pʰɪt/ |
| place | /pʰleɪs/ |
| prize | /pʰraɪz/ |
| English word | IPA form |
|---|---|
| spit | /spɪt/ |
| tip | /tʰɪp/ |
| lips | /lɪps/ |
English has no aspirated voiced sounds, but Hindi has them. They are normally written with an 'h' after the consonant letter. An example of this is the name Bhattacharya, in which 'bh' is an aspirated 'b' sound, so it would be written as /bʱ/ in IPA.
In Mandarin Chinese, there are no voiced stops, fricatives, or affricates and so the only way to tell them apart is by aspiration. In Pinyin, aspirated sounds are written like voiceless sounds in English and so the sounds /pʰ/, /tʰ/, and /kʰ/ are written as 'p', 't', and 'k' in the same order. However, unaspirated sounds are written like voiced sounds in English and so the sounds /p/, /t/, and /k/ are written as 'b', 'd', and 'g' respectively. For example, the word "Gaokao" would be written in IPA as /kau̯.kʰau̯/. In Wade-Giles, aspirated stops, fricatives, and affricates are written with an apostrophe after the letter instead of Pinyiin's use of a different letter and so "Gaokao" would be written as "Kaok'ao" in Wade-Giles.