Talk:Voiceless alveolar affricate

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Do not make edits if you don't have a source to back your claim

If you make an edit, please have an authoritative source to back your claim. Thanks azalea_pomp

English

No source is needed for English - as a native speaker of English, I am fully aware that almost all English speakers who don't use the /kæʔs/ pronouciation use the affricate pronounciation (I have never heard anyone use the non-affricate prouounciation in word-final position, except when they are speaking very slowly (and even then, it's still rare)).

If you wish, feel free to contact other fluent speakers of English for reassurance. User:Spacevezon^talk 22:13, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

While native speakers can provide lots of helpful insights and information, one of the things native speakers can not provide is phonetic particularities of their language. In this case, your claim contradicts what actual experts say about English. The English word cats exhibits a stop + fricative cluster, not an affricate. — Æµ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 23:55, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If you say so (but I pronounce it the affricate way, and I can tell the difference between the affricate and non-affricates) User:Spacevezon^talk 07:41, 24 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Have I understood it correctly - is this the phoneme in pizza? Why is it sometimes written as [ts] and sometimes as [t͡s]? Is there a difference and shouldn't that be explained in the article? Doccolinni (talk) 18:41, 16 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In English, the double zz in pizza is not a single phoneme, but two phonemes so that, if pizza were to use more typical English spelling, it would be peetsa. In precise phonetic transcription, there is a difference between [ts] and [t͡s], though there are varying differences between them depending on language. In Russian, for example, the difference is that the former takes twice as long to produce as the latter; in other languages, the former may have an independant release of the [t] before the [s] is pronounced. In less precise transcriptions, the tie bar is often omitted since most languages don't make a distinction. — Æµ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:58, 16 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

They may say it, and while I do accept that, I still can't really believe it completely (and still believe I use the affricate!). It seems to be a pervasive thought among native English speakers that this really is [t͡s]! I wonder why? Double sharp (talk) 14:38, 15 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

General American does use an alveolar affricate, however it's only used in syllable codas as an allophone for the consonantal cluster [ts]. If a person pronounces "cats" as [kʰæts] instead of [kʰæt͡s], a native GA speaker will hear it as an accent. As for the "pizza" thing, it depends on how you break the syllables up. [ˈpʰit.sə] seems to be a fairly common GA pronunciation, though my dialect (I'm from British Columbia, so I pretty much speak Pacific Northwest) breaks the syllables up as [ˈpʰit͡s.ə], where I pronounce the affricate because it's in a coda. I've added a section to my user page explaining the reasoning a bit more. Feel free to read it. See User:Midi_file_man#Alveolar_Affricates_In_English for more details. Midi file man (talk) 08:37, 15 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Syllabification is a suprasegmental element and concerns mostly with phonology than with phonetics (and there are quite a few ways of syllabifying English words on which scholars have not settled) so it doesn't determine how a sequence of sounds is pronounced phonetically (unless one has pre-defined what features syllabification will convey, like this). What differentiates an affricate from a sequence of homorganic stop and fricative is mostly phonological: every released stop is always accompanied by some frication anyway, so it's usually whether a sequence of such sounds acts as if it's one segment that determines whether it's an affricate.

I don't think cats, pizza, etc. in English are ever pronounced unlike an affricate. An un-affricate-like pronunciation of [ts] would mean that either the pulmonic egressive airstream is interrupted during the transition from [t] to [s], or the tongue tip lowers rapidly without much frication like a usual [t] and then immediately it's raised again to produce [s], which I for one don't recall ever producing or hearing in those words.

Also, as explained in the IPA chart, the tie bar for affricates is not mandatory, so [kʰæts] and [kʰæt͡s] don't really convey anything different except in a language where they constitute a minimal pair. Nardog (talk) 23:21, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

So first off, I just want to mention, your link to section on syllabification on the English Phonology page doesn't work. As far as I can tell, the only mention of it is in a brief sentence under Phonotactics. How do languages that do contrast consonant clusters phonetically distinguish them from their affricates? I know in English, I can say "cat shop" it doesn't sound like "catch op". Also, would "cat supper" [kʰæt ˈsʌpɚ] and "cats upper" [kʰæt͡s ʌpɚ] not qualify as a minimal pair?Midi file man (talk) 07:47, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oh sorry, English phonology#Syllable structure is what I meant. Division into syllables is a difficult area, and different theories have been proposed... and the rest of the section are the relevant part.

How do languages that do contrast consonant clusters phonetically distinguish them from their affricates? That must of course depend on language. In English, they are usually distinguished by /t/ (as in cat) being pronounced as a glottal stop [ʔ] and /ʃ/ (as in shop) being longer and possibly labialized. would "cat supper" [kʰæt ˈsʌpɚ] and "cats upper" [kʰæt͡s ʌpɚ] (sic) not qualify as a minimal pair? They may, in certain analyses, though I've never heard of one. As much as the concept of a syllable is not always well-defined for English, words and morphemes often are, so it is quite easy to dismiss such an analysis on the grounds that in order for sound(s) to be considered a single phoneme it must act independently and therefore must not occur spanning a morphological boundary. /tʃ, dʒ, ts, dz/ aren't the only phonetic affricates that occur in English. /tr, dr, tθ, dð, pf, bv/ are also often realized as affricates, but since their distribution is limited, they are not counted among affricates. See Wells (1982: 48–9) and Cruttenden (2014: 186–8) for more. (If we stopped taking morphological boundaries into consideration when discussing minimal pairs, we would then have to allow quite a few more phonemes into the inventory of English. Aspirated and unaspirated plosives would be phonemes on their own, and [ʔ], [ɾ], etc. would most likely get in.)

Polish is the only language that contrast affriactes and sequences of homorganic plosives and fricatives in onsets that I'm aware of, but the Polish phonology doesn't go into how they are distinguished phonetically (listening to the czysta–trzysta examples in the article, it sounds like the fricative is much longer and louder in [tʂ] than in [t͡ʂ]). @Kbb2: Can you explain it for us? Nardog (talk) 12:42, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I tried pronouncing "cat shop" with a glottal stop, though the result sounded Cockney to me. It didn't seem like something natural to GA. When I say "cat shop", I would say the stop and fricative are geminated slightly and the fricative comes in slightly later than the affricate.

At any rate, I feel like the phonetic realization of "cats" with the affricate, regardless of the debatable phonology, is still worth mentioning under the occurrence section of the article and possibly as a side note on the English Phonology article.

I agree, the fricative in the cluster is longer. I took a spectrogram of the two audio clips and the [ʂ] is pretty much doubled in length. I'm not quite sure what exactly you want explained, though I'm going to assume you mean the geminated [ʂ]. I would say, that by lengthening it, it is treated as a separate sound. Unless a person is talking really slow, most of the consonants, all of moderately similar length (where gemination is not applied), are treated as individual phonemes. By cutting down the length of the components during the affricate, it fits into the approximate space of one sound. As an analogy, think of using two adjacent eighth notes in place of a quarter note in 4/4 timing; they function as a unit despite being composite.

P.S. I also sort-of take back what I said with regards to the affricate [ts]'s use being exclusive to the coda. I think that's still true for the most part, there are certain loanwords which make up exceptions. People here actually seem to pronounce "tzatziki" and "tsetse fly" with the affricate despite replacing it with the silibant in "tsunami". Midi file man (talk) 22:24, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I don't think you understand the meaning of "geminated". A geminate is a consonant doubled in length compared to a singleton of the same type of consonant, so just because a consonant is longer than another doesn't mean it's "geminated". For example, even if the realization of a consonant phoneme is found to be consistently longer than others in a language, we usually don't call it a geminate and we transcribe it with a single symbol, unless a shorter version of the same consonant is also found. Therefore I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean by the stop and fricative are geminated slightly.

I also don't understand what exactly you mean by the fricative comes in slightly later. Do you mean that the airstream from the lungs is obstructed before [ʃ]? If so, isn't that the very effect of a glottal stop?

It's Kbb2, not you, who I asked for an explanation about Polish, by the way. Nardog (talk) 07:36, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Nardog: The fricative is definitely longer in the stop-fricative sequence than in the corresponding affricate. If I were to transcribe them in the narrowest possible manner, I'd say that [t̻^ʂʂ̻ː] vs. [t̻^ʂʂ̻] would be the best transcriptions. The superscript retroflex fricatives mean that they both have the same type of release, it's just that the fricative that is shorter in the affricate. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 17:58, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kbb2: Thanks! Do you know of a source that describes this phonetic difference? If so I'd like to see it covered in Polish phonology. Nardog (talk) 19:55, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Nardog: Sorry, no idea. I'm describing the movement of my tongue. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 20:15, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kbb2: Never mind, I found a source myself: Zagórska Brooks (1964). It's quite an old one, but it perfectly aligns with your description as well as our observations of the Commons recordings. Nardog (talk) 20:50, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

ʦ or ʧ?

I don't know if everything in this article is wrong, but the Polish example is. The citation of Jassem's article is a fake as in this article Polish Voiceless alveolar affricate is approximated as ʧ not as ʦ, while the latter is called (post)dental, not alveolar. Different languages have other allophonic realisations of their phonemes, so it is possible, that typical Polish s is more dental than typical English s (as Polish has no θ to be confused with s) and so are it's affricates. Actually in English there's only one phonemic affricate (in voiced and voiceless versions, but it's irrelevant here), while in Polish there are three, so it is crucial to discriminate between dental, alveolar and palatal (plus palatalised allophones of dental and alveolar ones that are not phonemic). However, every contrastive phonetic manual I know says that alveolar affricate is ʧ in contrast to ʦ, which makes me doubt in whole the article that says that typical alveolar affricate is ʦ. Panek (talk) 16:47, 7 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at "Retroflex fricatives in Slavic languages" by Silke Hamann. Typically, the sounds represented by e.g. sz are represented with the IPA characters for palato-alveolar fricatives ([ʃ]). If people call these alveolar, it's possibly because the point of contact is on the alveolar ridge though it sounds closer to a postalveolar fricative because, as Hamann's article indicates, these sounds are actually retroflex. — Æµ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 00:42, 8 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I know that Polish "sz" is also retroflex. As Kopczyński in "Andrzej Kopczyński: Polish and American English Consonant Phonemes : A Contrastive Study. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1977" says, the Polish "sz" and American English "sh" (and "cz"/"ch" respectively) are considered to be equivalents as they're both "hushing" which is a distinctive feature in Polish (in contrast to "hissing" (s, c) and "whisper" (ś, ć)) and irrelevant feature in English (as there are no other sibilants). As I wrote I don't expect full equality between sounds of different languages, so I can even accept, that Polish ʧ is more similar to hypothetical English ʦ than ʧ (postalvolar). The problem is, that in Polish there is another ʦ, which is rather dental or postdental than alveolar (and not retroflex AFAIK). This is not just Slavic-Germanic confrontation as Russian "ч" is more palatal than Polish "cz" (in Polish it is similar to a just palatalised allophone of "cz", eg. in 'Chile'). To sum up, it is disputable to say that Polish ʦ ("c") is alveolar, although it really reassembles German "z" or Italian "zz". And it is untrue to cite Jassem as a source for such a statement (as one can see in a link above to this very article). Probably it just should have its own article Voiceless postdental affricate, but I just wonder if other examples from this article are really alveolar or rather postdental as a Polish one (I know it is rather continuous than discrete feature and there are intermediate versions, not even mentioning allophonic variation). I saw some course-books saying that eg. German "z" is alveolar, but maybe it's just an English-centric simplification. Panek (talk) 15:20, 8 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

ƾ

According to Unicode^[1], "ƾ" is an archaic symbol for ʦ. Should this be added to the article? ObsequiousNewt (talk) 22:42, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf

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Affrication of /t/ in New Zealand English

Having read the cited source, Bauer et al. (2007), I can't find any clear support for the idea that New Zealand English may realise word-initial /t/ as [t͡s], such as in "tea" (the example given). What that paper actually says (on p.100, as in the citation) is:

.../t/ and /k/ are affricated when they occur initially in a stressed syllable (with no preceding syllable-initial /s/). ...affrication of plosives is realised as devoicing of a following sonorant consonant where there is one in the same syllable.

And that's it. (It isn't, for instance, indicated in the IPA transcription of the recorded passage; "take" is [tæek].)

Affrication seems to me much more broad than specific realisation as [t͡s]. I'm no phonetician, but couldn't it include any of the affricates discussed on this page? My (non-scientific) familiarity with New Zealand English leads me to imagine [t͡θ] (or even the postalveolar [t͡ʃ]?) rather than [t͡s]. -- Perey (talk) 17:48, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Perey: It's definitely [ts], though the fricative component may be very brief.

The transcription is [tæek] (there should be square brackets around the symbols). It's a broad phonetic transcription and it's usual to omit such details in it. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 18:15, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take your word for it, though I'd still like a source cited that's more specific on the affrication—especially given how finely detailed the classification in this article is ("voiceless non-retracted alveolar sibilant affricate" is what we get once we add all the sections and sub-sections together, and the cited paper is nowhere near that precise). And my bad on the // vs [] (I've corrected it). -- Perey (talk) 06:50, 3 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It is not an affricate

This section is mostly trivia... or something...

I don't know why english-speaking people think in this way. In slavic languages, hungarian and latvian the letter C is stop. The sound theese languages makes is far far away from saying t and s at the same time, it occurs only in fast speaking endlish like in let's go. This problem isn't a thing with other affricates like pf, bv, kx and ggh (gh is for voiced x). s is fricative version of c and fricative version of t is th (illustrated with english digraph)
Also IPA for deltal fricative (th) made new charcater which is like s and f (voiceless) or z and v (voiced) said at the same time. This is why Russians and Japanese pronounce the word The as Ze. And Polish as Ve and all languages that don't features dental fricative (including Ru, Ja, Pl) substitutes Th and Dh with t and d sounds (but maybe s+z fans less often than f+v fans), that's because th isn't bassically a new sound rather being s͡f or z͡v and sound represented by ts, c, is tottally different than t an s. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.27.104.66 (talk) 21:42, 28 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It is exactly like eng. CH. You don't pronounce this as t sh, but ch. Also it is fun and weird that if sh is hard s, and zh is hard z, so why c isn't plain c but instead s or k, and j - why not dz then jh as hard dz? 79.185.21.171 (talk) 19:31, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Greek

Reading Modern Greek phonology the article says ts is an allophone, but this article doesn't mention Greek, other then what it says for say Japanese. is this sound in Greek or not or have we just not gotten round to it? Great Mercian (talk) 17:40, 7 July 2022 (UTC) (Edited by Great Mercian (talk) 17:42, 7 July 2022 (UTC))[reply]

[1] www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf

[1]