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The Xhosa consonants include these minimal pairs:

ᵏǀʰ ⟨ch⟩    ᵏǁʰ ⟨xh⟩    ᵏǃʰ ⟨qh⟩
ᶢ̥ǀʱ ⟨gc⟩    ᶢ̥ǁʱ ⟨gx⟩    ᶢ̥ǃʱ ⟨gq⟩

They are distinguishing between the k and voiceless g in their orthography, but I thought k was voiceless g! What is the difference? Is there an audible difference? If so, do you have any audio demonstrating?

Ah zooming into the h it is g with curved h = ɦ, so there is also a slight distinction. Even so, can you explain the difference in quality between the pairs?

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  • [k] and [g̊] aren’t necessarily the same. For instance, Danish /p t k/ have often been described as [b̥ʰ d̥ˢʰ g̊ʰ], since they are lenis, despite being unvoiced and strongly aspirated (/t/ also strongly affricated). In the case of Xhosa, however, the difference in the following [ʰ] vs [ʱ] is likely the more salient clue: as you can see in the table you link to, the latter appears under slack voice, which is precisely what sets them apart from their ‘normal’ aspirated counterparts.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 11 at 0:01
  • @JanusBahsJacquet wait, Danish /p t k/ are lenis? I thought their voiceless unaspirated /b d g/ were the lenis ones and the voiceless aspirated /p t k/ were fortis?
    – Tristan
    Commented Nov 11 at 11:06
  • @Tristan No, they’re all lenis (or at least have traditionally been described as such). Even the aspirated ones involve significantly less muscle tension than their counterparts in English, or even than the unaspirated voiceless stops in French or Spanish. These days, this is generally ignored for regular transcription, since they’re fortis within the Danish system and only lenis when compared to similar systems in other languages, but it is a well-known feature.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 11 at 12:05
  • Ah ok. I'm used to fortis and lenis being used only wrt a particular phonology, which is why it surprised me
    – Tristan
    Commented Nov 11 at 13:42

1 Answer 1

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The key is in the labels:

screenshot of the table on Wikipedia

These are slack-voiced consonants, an uncommon sort of phonation similar to breathy voice. The vocal cords vibrate, but they're also opened to let more air through.

The trick with the IPA is that it's not as precise as laypeople tend to think. Many languages have two types of stop consonants distinguished by voice onset time (the time from the release of the closure to the start of vocal cord vibration), so the IPA provides symbols for those two types; some languages even have three, so it provides a third symbol as well (d t tʰ). But those symbols only have meaning in contrast to each other; the IPA doesn't define exactly what range of voice onset times each symbol represents.

So if you need more than those distinctions, what can you do? Well, you can add some diacritics; "voiced t" and "voiceless d" (t̬ d̥) seem like they should just be the same as normal d and t, but remember, the meaning of these symbols is only really defined in relation to each other. So those are reasonable (and not uncommon) ways to represent "something that's kind of like a voiced consonant and kind of like a voiceless consonant", which don't require creating entirely new non-IPA symbols.

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