noun
definition
A fricative.
Examples of spirants in a Sentence
The sounds of t and d are more dental than in English, though they vary; the voiced spirants are very soft; the voiceless nasals are aspirated, thus is similar to Eng.
Baluch, the language of Baluchistan, also very closely akin to New Persian, but especially distinguished from it in that all the old spirants arc changed into explosives, e.g.
The study of the spirants, c, 1, 1; g, j is made a very delicate one by the circumstance that the interdental pronunciation of c, 1 on the one hand, and the guttural pronunciation of g, j on the other, are of comparatively recent date, and convey no notion of the value of these letters before the 17th century.
The substitution of these interdental and guttural sounds for the surd and sonant spirants respectively did certainly not take place simultaneously, but the vacillations of the old orthography, and afterwards the decision of the Spanish Academy, which suppressed x (= I; x was retained for cs) and allows only c and g before e and i, I and j before a, a, a, make it impossible for us to follow, with the help of the written texts, the course of the transformation.
Thesources ofz(c)areLat.ce, cj,ij,s (cielo, c a e 1 u m; caiza, c a I c e a; razon, r a t i 0 n e m; zampoa, iv nip ho n i a)- As regards the spirants f and v, it is to be observed that at the beginning of a word f has in many instances been replaced by the aspirated h (afterwards silent), while in others no less current among the people the transformation has not taken place; thus we have hijo (f i Ii u m) alongside of fiesta (fast a).