Voiceless pharyngeal fricative
A voiceless pharyngeal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is an h-bar,. In the transcription of Arabic, Berber as well as a few other scripts, it is often written,.
Typically characterized as fricative in the upper pharynx, similar to, except that the latter is placed at the glottis instead.
Features of a voiceless pharyngeal fricative:
Occurrence
This sound is the most commonly cited realization of the Semitic letter hēth, which occurs in all dialects of Arabic, Classical Syriac, Western Neo-Aramaic, Central Neo-Aramaic, Ge'ez, Tigre, Tigrinya as well as Biblical, Mishnaic and Mizrahi Hebrew. It has also been reconstructed as appearing in Ancient Egyptian, a related Afro-Asiatic language. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Ashkenazi Hebrew and most speakers of Modern Hebrew have merged the voiceless pharyngeal fricative with the voiceless velar fricative. However, phonetic studies have shown that the so-called voiceless pharyngeal fricatives of Semitic languages are often neither pharyngeal nor fricatives.