Aspirated consonant

In Taiwanese phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies the release of obstruents. The aspirated consonants are ph, th, kh, ch, zh (IPA: [pʰ], [tʰ], [kʰ], [tɕʰ], [tsʰ]). They are composed of the symbols for the plain, unvoiced, unaspirated consonant (see tenuis consonant), followed by the letter h for aspiration.

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.

• POJ, the ancestor of MTL, also uses h to denote aspiration. This preserves b, g, and j for voiced consonants. A similar concept is also found in:
  • Wade-Giles (using the apostrophe)
  • McCune–Reischauer for Korean
  • ISO 11940 for Thai.
• 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, Italian and Spanish do not have phonemic aspirated consonants.