preaspiration

In phonetics, preaspiration (sometimes spelled pre-aspiration) is a period of voicelessness or aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless obstruent, basically an -like sound preceding the obstruent. In other words, when an obstruent is preaspirated, voicing stops and the glottis is opened for some time before the obstruent closure. To mark preaspiration using the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for regular aspiration, , can be placed before the preaspirated consonant. However, prefer to use a simple cluster notation, e.g. instead of .

==Typology== Preaspiration is comparatively uncommon across languages of the world, and is claimed by some to not be phonemically contrastive in any language. note that, at least in the case of Icelandic, preaspirated stops have a longer duration of aspiration than normally aspirated (post-aspirated) stops, comparable to clusters of +consonant in languages with such clusters. As a result, they view preaspiration as purely a distributional feature, indistinguishable phonetically and phonologically from clusters with , and prefer to notate preaspirated stops as clusters, e.g. Icelandic kappi "hero" rather than .