Aspirate (Noun)
Meaning
A consonant pronounced with aspiration.
Classification
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents.
Examples
- The linguist studied the aspiration of the "p" sound in the word "pat", noting that it was an example of a voiceless aspirate.
- In phonetics, a voiceless aspirate is a consonant sound that is accompanied by a puff of air, like the "th" sound in "this".
- Aspirates are often marked with a diacritic symbol in phonetic transcription to distinguish them from unaspirated sounds.
- The voiced aspirate is pronounced differently in different languages, with some languages using a stronger aspiration than others.
- In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the symbol "ʰ" is used to represent an aspirate, as in the transcription of the word "kʰat" for "cat".