Voiceless pharyngeal fricative

Features of a voiceless pharyngeal fricative:

• Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
• Its place of articulation is pharyngeal, which means it is articulated with the tongue root against the back of the throat (the pharynx).
• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
• It is an oral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
• It is a median consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream down the midline of the tongue, rather than to the sides.
• Its airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

This sound is the most commonly cited realization of the Semitic letter hēth, which occurs in all dialects of Arabic, Classical Syriac, Western Neo-Aramaic, Central Neo-Aramaic, Ge'ez, Tigre, Tigrinya as well as Biblical, Mishnaic and Mizrahi Hebrew. It has also been reconstructed as appearing in Ancient Egyptian, a related Afro-Asiatic language. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Ashkenazi Hebrew and most speakers of Modern Hebrew have merged the voiceless pharyngeal fricative with the voiceless velar (or uvular) fricative. However, phonetic studies have shown that the so-called voiceless pharyngeal fricatives of Semitic languages are often neither pharyngeal (but rather epiglottal) nor fricatives (but rather approximants).^[1]

• Voiced pharyngeal fricative
• Heth
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• Guttural
• H with stroke