Voiceless palatal affricate
| Voiceless palatal affricate | |
|---|---|
| c͡ç | |
| c͜ç | |
| cç | |
| IPA number | 107 (138) |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | c͡ç |
| Unicode (hex) | U+0063 U+0361 U+00E7 |
| X-SAMPA | c_C |
| Sound | |
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The voiceless palatal affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are ⟨c͡ç⟩ and ⟨c͜ç⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is c_C. The tie bar is sometimes omitted, yielding ⟨cç⟩ in the IPA and cC in X-SAMPA. This is potentially problematic in case of at least some affricates, because there are languages that contrast certain affricates with stop-fricative sequences. Polish words czysta ('clean (f.)', pronounced with an affricate /t͡ʂ/) and trzysta ('three hundred', pronounced with a sequence /tʂ/) are an example of a minimal pair based on such a contrast.
This sound is the non-sibilant equivalent of the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate.
The voiceless palatal affricate occurs in such languages as Hungarian and Skolt Sami, among others. The consonant is quite rare; it is mostly absent from Europe (with the Uralic languages and Albanian being exceptions). It usually occurs with its voiced counterpart, the voiced palatal affricate.
There is also the voiceless post-palatal affricate in some languages, which is articulated slightly more back compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical voiceless palatal affricate, though not as back as the prototypical voiceless velar affricate. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as ⟨c̠͡ç̠⟩, ⟨c͡ç˗⟩ (both symbols denote a retracted ⟨c͡ç⟩) or ⟨k̟͡x̟⟩ (advanced ⟨k͡x⟩) - this article uses only the first symbol. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are c_-_C_- and k_+_x_+, respectively.
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