How to mark unaspirated consonants in English? (2025)

Basically, English initials "p","t","k" are aspirated; But they are unaspirated consonants for almost all speakers when immediately following word-initial s, as in spun, stun, skunk, here, "p","t","k" are unaspirated.

My question is,For English native speakers,how to mark unaspirated consonants in English?

grubble said:

I don't understand what you mean by "to mark" a consonant. Could you give an example?

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I mean, for instance, how you distinguish an aspirated "p" and an unaspirated "p" by writing them down? In some case, if I want to emphasize that the "p" of "maple" is unaspirated in some dialect, I will write it as "map⁼le" instead of "maple". Of course only myself can understand that kind of mark. Any traditional or widely-accepted written system of unaspirated consonants by English native speakers?

What do you mean? In IPA? The equals sign you mentioned is the way I've seen it marked, although most of the time you can just write the stop without any sort of diacritic.

If you don't mean IPA, then I'm not sure what you're asking. If you mean how to transcribe a foreign word into English and specify that some voiceless stop is unaspirated in the foreign language, then that's impossible. Transcriptions aren't going to be exact, you can't really expect any old English speaker to produce unaspirated stops in a context where they're normally aspirated in English. Aspiration is allophonic in English, so English speakers don't even perceive that the p in "pun" and "spun" are different--they're both just perceived as the sound p. Most English speakers without any knowledge of linguistics don't even know what aspiration is, so of course there's no way to write it in the English alphabet for people to understand.

If the language you're trying to transcribe in English lacks phonemic voiced stops (but has phonemic aspiration), then maybe transcribe an unaspirated stop as a voiced stop in English. This is how it's done in some Korean romanization systems. Otherwise transcribe it as a voiceless stop.

Because the p of maple begins an unstressed syllable, it is not aspirated like the p of May pole, and it is never aspirated following syllable-initial s.

In American English, unaspirated t may be flapped, as in the word latter, and the flapped t may even be voiced, making latter sound just like ladder with a flapped d, a sound similar to an Italian r.

The other unvoiced stops (p and k) remain unvoiced even when unaspirated.

I hope this helps.

eclectic said:

Basically, English initials "p","t","k" are aspirated; But they are unaspirated consonants for almost all speakers when immediately following word-initial s, as in spun, stun, skunk, here, "p","t","k" are unaspirated.

My question is,For English native speakers,how to mark unaspirated consonants in English?

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Aspirated p, k, t are placed between [] with a little superscript h like this [ph] where the letter "h" is in superscript). Unaspirated sounds go without this little "h"

eclectic said:

Any traditional or widely-accepted written system of unaspirated consonants by English native speakers?

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No, there is none. English dictionaries never mark aspiration or its absence, because there is never any choice in the matter (in standard accents): it's always determined by its position. There is no symbol for unaspirated in the IPA. Even someone trained in phonetics would not have any familiar or widely-known way of showing unaspirated, apart from the simple lack of the aspiration symbol.

As mentioned above, one sign used by some authors is a superscript '='-sign, but I had to look that up. I've never seen it in actual use in any linguistic text.

The superscript h (as described by NewName) is the only way I know of showing aspiration. See the first line of this > http://www.unc.edu/~tofu/ling101/loggrab/ipa-diacritics.pdf (NB: this is a PDF file, but it's a very small one).

A reverse apostrophe can also be used for aspiration, but it tends to get confused with the regular apostrophe. Superscript h is the clearest way to denote aspiration.

A text with superscript hs denotes the lack of aspiration by the lack of a superscript h.

eclectic said:

Basically, English initials "p","t","k" are aspirated; But they are unaspirated consonants for almost all speakers when immediately following word-initial s, as in spun, stun, skunk, here, "p","t","k" are unaspirated.

My question is,For English native speakers,how to mark unaspirated consonants in English?

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You can't mark aspiration or absence of aspiration in regular English alphabet, but you can do it in IPA - international phonetic alphabet. You should learn it. Basically, in IPA, every word is spelled exactly as they're sound (unlike the English alphabet. E.g. "Knight"; "psychology". In IPA, you wouldn't have to memorize the pronunciation of specific words. You know how it's pronounced just by reading the word in IPA.).

To mark aspiration in IPA, you type a superscript lowercase "h".
To mark lack of aspiration, or unreleased stop, you type a little upper-right diacritic on the letter like this: [p̚ ], [t̚ ], [k̚ ]
So here's how you type "spun" in IPA: [sp̚ʌn]

For more info, seach on wikipedia: no audible release

That's a very good observation. This type of phenomenon happens a lot in languages. If you want to know more about these lingustics features, learn phonetics.