A voiceless palatal nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are and , which are combinations of the letter for the voiced palatal nasal and a diacritic indicating voicelessness.
If distinction is necessary, a voiceless alveolo-palatal nasal may be transcribed as (devoiced, retracted and palatalized ), or (devoiced and advanced ); these are essentially equivalent, since the contact includes both the blade and body (but not the tip) of the tongue. A non-IPA letter (devoiced , which is an ordinary , plus the curl found in the symbols for alveolo-palatal sibilant fricatives ) can also be used.
Features
Features of a voiceless palatal nasal:
Occurrence Language Word IPA Meaning NotesBaniwaHohodene'to eat' Burmese /nya: 'considerate' Faroese 'nothing' See Faroese phonology Hmong White Hmong / 'heavy' Contrasts with voiced . In Green Hmong, it has merged with /ɲ/. Iaai 'to dedicate' Icelandic 'bank' See Icelandic phonology Jalapa Mazatec 'brush' Xumi Lower 'clean' Alveolo-palatal; occurs mostly in loanwords from Tibetan.
See also Index of phonetics articles
Notes
References
External links