Aspirated consonant

In MTL, the aspirated consonants are ph, th, kh, ch, and zh (IPA: [pʰ], [tʰ], [kʰ], [tɕʰ], [tsʰ]). They are composed of the letter for the plain consonant (p, t, k, c, or z), plus the letter h for aspiration, or strong burst of breath.

In English, we aspirate p, t, and k when they occur at the beginning of words, but don't really aspirate when they are inside the word. For example, think about the "p" inside "copy", "spot", and "spy".

Peh-oe-ji, the ancestor of MTL, also uses h to denote aspiration. This leaves b, d, g, and j for the muddy or voiced consonants. A similar convention is also found in:

• Wade-Giles (using the apostrophe)
• International Phonetic Alphabet (uses ʰ)
• McCune–Reischauer for Korean (apostrophe)
• ISO 11940 for Thai (h)

Other notes:

• 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.

See also

• tenuis consonant
• List of all initial consonants in MTL