Talk:Voiceless glottal fricative

Romanian has a [h]? Isn't that [x]? I've heard a native speaker pronounce it that way. The surrounding Slavic languages whose influence is supposed all have [x] but not [h].

Isn't the Uzbek sound something like [ħ]?

IMHO [h] is a glottal flap preceded by a glottal fricative or approximant. When I whisper /h/, only the fricative/approximant remains (it could be transcribed as [ɦ̥], and occurs at the end of words in e. g. Navajo); if I add the flap, I recognize the result as [hʔ].

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 1:24 CEST | 2006/5/11 (the first 3 sentences are maybe a year older)

Armenian

Beyond question, Armenian has the voiced glottal fricative [ɦ] rather than the voiceless glottal fricative [h]. In Dum-Tragut's book we can very clearly see this phoneme in the line with the rest of Armenian's VOICED PHONEMES, not the voiceless. (See Dum-Tragut, page 18.) The only problem is the wrong IPA sign Ms Dum-Tragut chose for this phoneme ([h]) (there are still a lot of minor mistakes in the book), but nevertheless she gives the phoneme in the correct line - with the VOICED ones. I corrected this mistake, but unfortunately my correction was undone and, what is very surprising, a wrong reference was even made later. Could someone correct it? I don't know how it can be made. Thank you. --Mahtrqerin (talk) 10:05, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm skeptical. Everything else I've seen says that it's voiceless. If she makes mistakes from time to time, it's more likely that she mistakenly put it in the wrong row. Do you have any other sources? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 15:04, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

It's a real headache, this [ɦ]! All the material I've read until now states it's voiceless [h]. Even Bert Vaux says this. Nevertheless, this is a common mistake scientists copy from one book to another. The only reference is Dum-Tragut where she put it in the right line but unfortunately gave the wrong IPA symbol. Well, the English [h] is so strange to my ear when comparing with the Armenian [ɦ]: being a voiceless sound, the English [h] sounds even closer to the pharyngeal [ħ] than to the voiced [ɦ]. The vocal folds vibrate when one utters the Armenian [ɦ] and this is not a dialectal feature, but it's the only possible way to pronounce it - both in dialects and in the SMEA / SMWE. So, isn't Dum-Tragut the best citation and reference source here? I can see it is! Why don't we change [h] to [ɦ] now? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mahtrqerin (talk • contribs) 15:10, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

If sources regularly describe the sound as voiceless, we'll need a bit more than inference from Dum-Tragut to unseat it. This might be one of those things where verifiability comes at the expense of the truth. Take a look at WP:VNT. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 15:51, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and that is the problem.--Mahtrqerin (talk) 18:12, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

IPA convention

IPA calls this "voiceless glottal fricative." The article needs to acknowledge this as the convention in phonetics. Seraphimek (talk) 01:45, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Better yet, sources that use each term (voiceless glottal fricate and transition) should be listed. — Eru·tuon 02:19, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Once again, a very obscure word is the Romanian example

The Romanian example is hăț - a word that I have definitely never heard, and which is defined as "bridle". I have overheard a lot of Romanian in my lifetime, this is a very common phoneme. I am not a native speaker so I won't change the example, but please: Use a word that is not super rare. I'm almost 100% sure a native Romanian speaker could find an example that uses this phoneme that is one or two syllables and is one of the 500 most common words. Also, the text currently uses the wrong Unicode symbol for letter ț. It looks similar, but it is not on a Romanian keyboard. I am going to fix it, because this is definitely an error and may be related to the keyboard of the Wikipedian who wrote it, so that's totally understandable. Fluoborate (talk) 11:42, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Need clarification

Hi all! It seems to me that this article is somewhat unclear. What exactly does "voiceless glottal fricative" refer to in this article? It doesn't seem that this article is actually talking about a specific sound, because the article states that in some languages, it actually is a fricative, while in others, it is not a fricative. Are there any necessary and sufficient conditions for a sound to count as a "voiceless glottal fricative"? Or is it a situation of "family resemblance"? Or is just that "voiceless glottal fricative" is a well defined concept, but in practice, linguists use that term somewhat sloppily to refer to sounds that aren't technically voiceless glottal fricatives? The article says that the symbol for this sound in IPA is [h], but knowing the symbol for something doesn't actually tell us what it is. Unless what the article refers to as "voiceless glottal fricative" is the set of all sounds that are transcribed in IPA by [h]? That seems somewhat circular though. Thanks for reading! JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 01:06, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Ukrainian

In the 'Occurrence' section (examples) it is mentioned that Ukrainian has a sound [h] as a devoiced allophone of /ɦ/ (/г/) linking to the Ukrainian phonology article. As an example the word "кігті" ("nails") is given. Neither article about Ukrainian phonology, nor any Ukrainian source I've read ever mentions the sound [h] occurring as a voiceless allophone to /ɦ/. The sound [x] is considered to be a voiceless allophone of /ɦ/ (/г/), occurring in front of voiceless obstruents, and dialectically and colloquially also occurring at the end of a word (as an example, "бог" meaning "god"). Ukrenko (talk) 18:28, 9 April 2023 (UTC)