# /χ/ as an allophone of /h/ in American English



## tFighterPilot

I listen to a lot of American English online and I noticed more than one speaker sometimes pronounces /χ/ instead of /h/, mostly when he tries to put stress on it. Does my observation hold water?


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## merquiades

tFighterPilot said:


> I listen to a lot of American English online and I noticed more than one speaker sometimes pronounces /χ/ instead of /h/, mostly when he tries to put stress on it. Does my observation hold water?



Interesting observation.  Could you tell us the word and context you heard the /x/?
All I could say is it's certainly true that the "h" is usually pronounced strong in all contexts in America (but I'm not familiar with many western dialects).  In British English (London at least) I've noticed it's often weakened and/or dropped completely.  Maybe this strong pronunciation (contrast) is what you have noticed.


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## berndf

There are certainly realizations which are at least close to [χ]. But what I hear is even closer to [ħ]. Also, there is one /h/ allophone occurring on in practically all varieties of English: In front of /j/ as in "human" is palatalized to [ç].

@merquides: Replacement of  by [ʔ] is a typical feature or Cockney dialect.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> There are certainly realizations which are at least close to [χ]. But what I hear is even closer to [ħ]. Also, there is one /h/ allophone occurring on in practically all varieties of English: In front of /j/ as in "human" is palatalized to [χ].
> 
> @merquides: Replacement of  by [ʔ] is a typical feature or Cockney dialect.




Spanish speakers often replace  by [χ] when speaking English:  xi: xit xer.  It would seem strange for native speakers to do that.  Unfortunately, I often pronounce  as [ç] in "human", "huge".

I thought [ʔ] was the sound Cockney speakers used for intervocalic t, like in "better", "button", "butter".


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Unfortunately, I often pronounce  as [ç] in "human", "huge".


Why "unfortunately"? This is quite normal.


merquiades said:


> I thought [ʔ] was the sound Cockney speakers used for intervocalic t, like in "better", "button", "butter".


That is not a contradiction, is it? Actually, not all dropped /h/es necessarily become /ʔ/ though word initially they usually do.


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## Ihsiin

I have to say, it tends more to the word initial /h/s that are dropped, but in any regard I don't think it's strictly right to say that the /h/ becomes /ʔ/; rather the /h/ simply disappears, and utterance initially (rather than word initially) this means beginning with an /ʔ/, as with all utterances that 'begin' with vowels.
Also, this isn't unique to cockney; /h/ is dropped in a large variety of dialects across England, mainly those associated with 'the lower classes'.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> Why "unfortunately"? This is quite normal.


I just personally think it's better to avoid that sound and stick to /h/.



> That is not a contradiction, is it? Actually, not all dropped /h/es necessarily become /ʔ/ though word initially they usually do.



No, I guess not.  I'll have to listen to this accent more.  It would produce an incredible amount of /ʔ/.   Imagine all the /ʔ/ in a sentence like this:  He has been hitting his little daughter Helen.


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## Hulalessar

Native speakers are not perhaps the best to express opinions on the subtleties of pronunciation, but I confess I am bemused by the assertions that



> there is one /h/ allophone occurring on in practically all varieties of English: In front of /j/ as in "human" is palatalized to [ç]




and 




> not all dropped /h/es necessarily become /ʔ/ though word initially they usually do



----

I wonder if what people are hearing as /ʔ/ is in fact a pause. (We have touched on this in this thread: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2231314 )


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> I wonder if what people are hearing as /ʔ/ is in fact a pause.


The pause is certainly what matters, I accept that. If you take sequences like "he ate", you can realize the pause between "he" and "ate" with or without glottal closure; but very there is one.


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## Hulalessar

In some articulations of "he ate" there is not necessarily a pause, just no consonant between them, i.e. the two vowels may be described as being in hiatus. Or is it the case that hiatus literally involves a hiatus?

When it comes to some speakers I think you can hear a /j/ between the two vowels.


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## berndf

I thought you meant hiatus when you wrote "pause".


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## Outsider

merquiades said:


> Imagine all the /ʔ/ in a sentence like this:  He has been hitting his little daughter Helen.


Well, for one thing "he has" would ordinarily be contracted to "he's". If I can trust my impressions, a cockney pronunciation of that sentence would go something like* 'e's bin 'iʔin' 'is dauʔer 'Ellen*. I'm not sure if the initial "h" in "Hellen" would be pronounced or not.


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## Hulalessar

By "hiatus" I mean that two adjacent vowels do not form a diphthong, but are articulated as two separate syllables. The question is whether there is a slight pause between them (hence the name hiatus?) or whether /ʔ/ or a glide such as /j/ slips in.

In the "standard" articulation of "there is a cart in the garage" you get /t/ whilst in many articulations /ʔ/ appears. No problem there.

But what happens in "there is a Mini in the garage"? Is there /j/ between and "Mini" and "in", /ʔ/ or a pause. If there is a pause is that what the IPA intends should be indicated by the "syllable break" dot?


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## merquiades

Outsider said:


> Well, for one thing "he has" would ordinarily be contracted to "he's". If I can trust my impressions, a cockney pronunciation of that sentence would go something like* 'e's bin 'iʔin' 'is dauʔer 'Ellen*. I'm not sure if the initial "h" in "Hellen" would be pronounced or not.




Your intuition seems flawless to me.  I bet the "h" just disappears and there is a pause, not really one of those /ʔ/, similar like what happens with those formally aspirated /h/ in French:  Les haricots,  en haut.

Anyway, to go back to the original question, I don't think /h/ dropping occurs at all in America, so maybe it could sound like /x/ to somebody who's not used to consistent aspiration?  Especially when there's a lot of aspiration in a row:  He hates hot hamburgers.  Yet I doubt it's really /x/.  It sounds too foreign.  
I still would love to hear an example.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Yet I doubt it's really /x/.  It sounds too foreign.


I think we should be more precise here. FP's question was about /χ/ and not about /x/.


merquiades said:


> I still would love to hear an example.


The "h" in the top rated pronounced of "hundred" by anakat here is not . I don't think it is [χ] either. As I said in #3, I hear it as [ħ]. In FP's native language 95%+ of speakers merge /ħ/ into /χ/. This might be the reason why he hears it as [χ].


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## tFighterPilot

berndf said:


> I think we should be more precise here. FP's question was about /χ/ and not about /x/.
> The "h" in the top rated pronounced of "hundred" by anakat here is not . I don't think it is [χ] either. As I said in #3, I hear it as [ħ]. In FP's native language 95%+ of speakers merge /ħ/ into /χ/. This might be the reason why he hears it as [χ].



I can tell apart [χ] from [ħ] of course. I think it depends on the vowel that follows. The /ʌ/ in "hundred" is a back vowel, which would explain why we get a back consonant. Still, I should've been more precise. /χ/ is a fricative and what I was talking about is an approximant (which is how I personally pronounce Khaf, hence my mistake). I think the correct way say it is that /h/ is realization can be anywhere in the range of glottal approximant and uvular approximant.


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## Hulalessar

I went here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_uvular_fricative and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_pharyngeal_fricative and listened to the sounds. Neither is a sound that I can recognise as being an allophone of /h/ in any variety of English I know, but as I said above, native speakers are not perhaps the best to express opinions on the subtleties of pronunciation.


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## berndf

tFighterPilot said:


> I can tell apart [χ] from [ħ] of course. I think it depends on the vowel that follows. The /ʌ/ in "hundred" is a back vowel, which would explain why we get a back consonant. Still, I should've been more precise. /χ/ is a fricative and what I was talking about is an approximant (which is how I personally pronounce Khaf, hence my mistake). I think the correct way say it is that /h/ is realization can be anywhere in the range of glottal approximant and uvular approximant.


Then I am skeptical as well.

There isn't really a clear distinction between fricatives and approximants with gutturals. Classification of , [ħ] and [χ] as fricatives more a simple convention rather than anything else. So, I am not quite sure what you mean. Khaf and English /h/ are difficult to compare because Khaf can only occur in a syllable coda and English /h/ only in a syllable onset. The historical allophones of /h/ in the syllable coda were [x] and [ç] but they survived only in Scots.

If the sound in the pronunciation of "hundred" I referenced above is not what you mean then I would also love to hear an example.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> I went here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_uvular_fricative and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_pharyngeal_fricative and listened to the sounds. Neither is a sound that I can recognise as being an allophone of /h/ in any variety of English I know, but as I said above, native speakers are not perhaps the best to express opinions on the subtleties of pronunciation.


I find these stand alone samples a bit problematic. There is a sample word on the Wikipedia page from Hebrew (oriental dialects): חַשְׁמַל. There is a sample word from Arabic for which you can find samples on Forvo: حال  (ḥāl). Other Arabic sample words are حماس‎ (ḥamās) and محمد (Muḥammad).


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## Ihsiin

A little insert: personally I've never heard "h" realised as /ħ/ in any kind of English.
In Irish English, where "wh" is still aspirated, you can sometimes hear words like "when" realised as [xwen] or [χwen], and so on with "why", "what", et cetera, (to be honest I'm no good at hearing the difference between /χ/ and /x/).


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## berndf

Ihsiin said:


> A little insert: personally I've never heard "h" realised as /ħ/ in any kind of English.
> In Irish English, where "wh" is still aspirated, you can sometimes hear words like "when" realised as [xwen] or [χwen], and so on (to be honest I'm no good at hearing the difference between /χ/ and /x/).


How would you then describe the kind of "h" in "hundred" I linked too? Or do you say, you've never heard it pronounced that way?


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## Ihsiin

I'm not entirely sure. To me it sounds like /h/, perhaps more "breathy" than average. Also, when I emulate that pronunciation, I feel the merest, tiniest suggestion of an uvular fricative.
What I'm sure of is that it's not the same sound as ح.


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## berndf

Ihsiin said:


> I'm not entirely sure. To me it sounds like /h/, perhaps more "breathy" than average. Also, when I emulate that pronunciation, I feel the merest, tiniest suggestion of an uvular fricative.
> What I'm sure of is that it's not the same sound as ح.


And I would say I am pretty sure it isn't [χ] or [x] and not . Very difficult to describe. How is it differing from  ح in your mind?


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## Hulalessar

On this Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology  it says:


/h/ becomes [ç˕] before [j]and_, as in __human [ˈç˕juːmən] or [ˈç˕uːmən].˕ apparently indicates lowering, though it is not clear to me what is lowered.


And on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_glottal_fricative#Occurrence it says:






 English RP [4] be*h*ind                        [bɪˈɦaɪnd]                        'behind'            Some            speakers, only between vowels. See English            phonology





This page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_glottal_fricative is quite interesting in its description of /h/. “Although  ...lacks the place and manner of articulation of a prototypical consonant, it also lacks the height and backness of a prototypical vowel”  seems to agree wth the Ancient Greeks who had no letter for /h/ but indicated aspiration by a diacritic mark.


I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I have left it too late in life to try and get a firm grip on phonetics. _


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> /h/ becomes [ç˕] before [j]and_, as in __human [ˈç˕juːmən] or [ˈç˕uːmən].˕ apparently indicates lowering, though it is not clear to me what is lowered._


_I guess it's meant to indicate that [__ç] is to be pronounced as an approximant rather than as a fricative, i.e. an unvoiced [j].


Hulalessar said:



			This page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_glottal_fricative is quite interesting in its description of /h/. “Although  ...lacks the place and manner of articulation of a prototypical consonant, it also lacks the height and backness of a prototypical vowel”  seems to agree wth the Ancient Greeks who had no letter for /h/ but indicated aspiration by a diacritic mark.

Click to expand...

Nice explanation. But the real story behind it is a bit more banal, I'm afraid. What we learn as "classical Greek" in school is Attic pronunciation with Ionic spelling (Athens adopted Ionic spelling after 404BC) and Ionic dialects lacked /h/ and hence had no sign for it. The aspiration diacritic was a later addition to indicate the word-initial phonemic /h/ non-Ionic dialects still had (Heta).
 _


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> I think we should be more precise here. FP's question was about /χ/ and not about /x/.
> The "h" in the top rated pronounced of "hundred" by anakat here is not . I don't think it is [χ] either. As I said in #3, I hear it as [ħ]. In FP's native language 95%+ of speakers merge /ħ/ into /χ/. This might be the reason why he hears it as [χ].




Anakat's "h" in hundred seems unnaturally strong to me, breathy, likes she's stressing the "h", but it still does not sound like [χ] to me.


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## Hulalessar

merquiades said:


> Anakat's "h" in hundred seems unnaturally strong to me, breathy, likes she's stressing the "h", but it still does not sound like [χ] to me.



And of course what we do not know is whether Anakat actually pronounces "hundred" as she does in the example when she uses the word in everyday speech. Samples of speech provided for the benefit of linguists are not always reliable.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> Nice explanation. But the real story behind it is a bit more banal, I'm afraid.[/COLOR] What we learn as "classical Greek" in school is Attic pronunciation with Ionic spelling (Athens adopted Ionic spelling after 404BC) and Ionic dialects lacked /h/ and hence had no sign for it. The aspiration diacritic was a later addition to indicate the word-initial phonemic /h/ non-Ionic dialects still had (Heta).



Noted think you.

_A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

_*Alexander Pope*


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Anakat's "h" in hundred seems unnaturally strong to me, breathy, likes she's stressing the "h", but it still does not sound like [χ] to me.


Not, I agree. It is not [χ].

I associate this pronunciation with some Southern or South-Western accents, but I may be wrong. It is similar to the way the "j" is pronounced in names of Mexican origin, like "San *J*ose".


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## Ihsiin

berndf said:


> And I would say I am pretty sure it isn't [χ] or [x] and not . Very difficult to describe. How is it differing from  ح in your mind?




ح has much more going on in the throat. It really his a fricative, while this "h" sounds more like an approximate. I agree that it's not a /χ/ or a /x/, but I feel there's more going on the roof of the mouth than in the throat.


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## berndf

Ihsiin said:


> ح has much more going on in the throat. It really his a fricative, while this "h" sounds more like an approximate. I agree that it's not a /χ/ or a /x/, but I feel there's more going on the roof of the mouth than in the throat.


In theory,  should be even further back in the throat than [ħ]. This is so in IPA where  is classified as a glottal fricative and also in Tajweed-teaching in Arabic (here). I agree that in reality  it often non-fricative. But *if* it is fricative that it should be glottal and this is not glottal.

But as English has no velar or guttural unvoiced fricatives other then /h/, the location of the sound is probably relatively imprecise as there is no need to distinguish it from other similar sounds.


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## Hulalessar

Bearing in mind what the Wikipedia article I referred to above says, is it not the case, at least for English, that /h/ is only phonologically a consonant and that phonetically cannot really be classified as either a vowel or a consonant?


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