Aspirated consonant

In Taiwanese phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies the release of obstruents.

In MTL, the aspirated consonants are: ph, th, kh, ch, zh. Note that they are written using the symbols for voiceless consonants (p, t, k, c, z) followed by the aspiration modifier letter h.

You may have already noticed that this is a bit different from English, which always aspirates p, t, and k when they occur at the beginning of words.

Why would we choose to use these letters different from English?

• POJ, the ancestor of MTL, also uses h to denote aspiration. This preserves b, (d), g, and j for voiced consonants.
• The convention of the apostrophe or "h" to denote aspiration is also found in romanizations of other Asian languages, such as McCune–Reischauer for Korean and ISO 11940 for Thai.
• Even the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses the aspiration modifier letter ⟨◌ʰ⟩ following symbols for voiceless consonants.
• In Japanese, the voiceless stops /p, t, k/ are slightly aspirated: less aspirated than English stops, but more so than Spanish.
• French, Dutch and Spanish don't even have aspirated consonants. So they use initial p, t, and k pretty much the same as in written Taiwanese.