Some languages, however, have a palatal approximant that is unspecified for rounding and so cannot be considered the semivocalic equivalent of either or its rounded counterpart, , which would normally correspond to . An example is
Spanish, which distinguishes two palatal approximants: an approximant semivowel , which is always unrounded (and is a phonological vowel - an allophone of ), and an approximant consonant unspecified for rounding, (which is a phonological consonant). Eugenio Martínez Celdrán describes the difference between them as follows (with audio examples added): Celdrán also considers that "the IPA shows a lack of precision in the treatment it gives to approximants, if we take into account our understanding of the phonetics of Spanish. and are two different segments, but they have to be labelled as voiced palatal approximant consonants. I think that the former is a real consonant, whereas the latter is a
semi-consonant, as it has traditionally been called in Spanish, or a semi-vowel, if preferred. The IPA, though, classifies it as a consonant." There is a parallel problem with transcribing
voiced velar approximants. In the writing systems used for most languages of Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, the letter
j denotes a palatal approximant, as in
German 'year', which is followed by IPA. Although it may be seen as counterintuitive for English-speakers, there are a few words with that orthographical spelling in certain loanwords in English like Hebrew "
hallelujah" and German "
Jägermeister". In grammars of
Ancient Greek, a palatal approximant, which was lost early in the
history of Greek, is sometimes written as , an
iota with the
inverted breve below, which is the nonsyllabic diacritic or marker of a
semivowel. ==Features==