Voiced dental and alveolar lateral fricatives

The voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is ɮ (sometimes referred to as lezh), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is K\.

Voiced alveolar lateral fricative
ɮ
IPA Number149
Audio sample
Encoding
Entity (decimal)ɮ
Unicode (hex)U+026E
X-SAMPAK\
Braille⠇ (braille pattern dots-123)⠐ (braille pattern dots-5)⠮ (braille pattern dots-2346)

Features

Features of the voiced alveolar lateral fricative:

Occurrence

Dental or denti-alveolar

LanguageWordIPAMeaningNotes
AmisKangko accentInterdental [ɮ̪͆]

Alveolar

LanguageWordIPAMeaningNotes
Adygheкъалэ'town'Can also be pronounced as [l]
ArabicClassical Arabicالأَرضِ'the earth'
Bura[1][example needed]Contrasts with [ɬ] and [ʎ̝̊].[1]
EnglishSouth Africanibandla[iˈbaːnɮa]'meeting of a Nguni chief or community'Only found in Zulu loan words in South African English.
Kabardianблы'seven'Can also be pronounced as [l]
Ketолын[ɔɮɨn]'nose'Can also be pronounced as [l]
Moloko[2]zlan[ɮàŋ]'start, begin'Contrasts with [ɬ], [l] and [ʒ]
Mongolianмонгол[mɔɴɢɔ̆ɮ]'Mongol'Sometimes realized as [ɬ]
Sassaresecaldhu'hot'
Tera[3]dlepti[ɮè̞pti]'planting'Contrasts with both [ɬ] and [l]
Zulu[4]ukudla[úɠù:ɮá]'to eat'Contrasts with both [ɬ] and [l]; realized as [] after nasals

In addition, a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative is reconstructed to be the ancient Classical Arabic pronunciation of Ḍād; the letter is now pronounced in Modern Standard Arabic as a pharyngealized voiced coronal stop, as alveolar [] or denti-alveolar [d̪ˤ].

Related characters

There are several Unicode characters based on lezh (ɮ):

  • U+1079E 𐞞 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL LEZH is a superscript IPA letter[5]
  • U+1079F 𐞟 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL LEZH WITH RETROFLEX HOOK is a superscript IPA letter[5]
  • U+1DF05 𝼅 LATIN SMALL LETTER LEZH WITH RETROFLEX HOOK is an extension to IPA for disordered speech (extIPA)[5][6]

Notation

Former IPA symbol for the voiced alveolar lateral fricative

In 1938, a symbol shaped similarly to heng was approved as the official IPA symbol for the voiced alveolar lateral fricative, replacing ɮ. It was suggested at the same time, however, that a compromise shaped like something between the two may also be used at the author's discretion. It was this compromise version that was included in the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association and the subsequent IPA charts, until it was replaced again by ɮ at the 1989 Kiel Convention.[7] Despite the Association's prescription, ɮ is nonetheless seen in literature from the 1960s to the 1980s.[8][9][10][11][12]

See also

Notes

References

External links