A
voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or
voiceless domed postalveolar fricative is a type of
consonantal sound used in many
languages, including English. In English, it is usually spelled , as in
ship. of a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , the letter
esh introduced by
Isaac Pitman (not to be confused with the
integral symbol ). An alternative symbol is , an
s with a
caron or
háček, which is used in the
Americanist phonetic notation and the
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in the
scientific and
ISO 9 transliterations of Cyrillic. It originated with the
Czech orthography of
Jan Hus and was adopted in
Gaj's Latin alphabet and other Latin alphabets of Slavic languages. It also features in the orthographies of many
Baltic,
Finno-Samic, North American and
African languages.
Features Features of the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative:
Occurrence In various languages, including English and French, it may have simultaneous
labialization, i.e. , although this is usually not transcribed.
Classical Latin did not have , though it does occur in most
Romance languages. For example, in French "singer" is pronounced . is descended from Latin , where was pronounced . The in Latin "science" was pronounced , but has shifted to in Italian . Similarly,
Proto-Germanic had neither nor , yet many of its descendants do. In most cases, this or descends from a Proto-Germanic . For instance, Proto-Germanic *skipą ("hollow object, water-borne vessel larger than a boat") was pronounced . The English word "ship" has been pronounced without the the longest, the word being descended from
Old English "" , which already also had the , though the Old English spelling etymologically indicated that the old had once been present. This change took longer to catch on in West Germanic languages other than Old English, though it eventually did. The second West Germanic language to undergo this sound shift was
Old High German. After High German, the shift most likely then occurred in Low Saxon. After Low Saxon, Middle Dutch began the shift, but it stopped shifting once it reached , and has kept that pronunciation since. Then, most likely through influence from German and Low Saxon,
North Frisian experienced the shift. Then, Swedish quite swiftly underwent the shift, which resulted in the very uncommon phoneme, which, aside from Swedish, is only used in
Colognian, a variety of High German, though not as a replacement for the standard High German but a coronalized . However, the exact realization of Swedish varies considerably among dialects; for instance, in Northern dialects it tends to be realized as . See
sj-sound for more details. Finally, the last to undergo the shift was Norwegian, in which the result of the shift was . The sound in
Russian denoted by is commonly transcribed as a palato-alveolar fricative but is actually an
apical retroflex fricative. ==Voiceless postalveolar non-sibilant fricative==