Eleanor Horner

Summary of and thoughts on the article “Reflection on the term ‘affricate’” by Miguel Ayerbe Linares.

Linares, Miguel Ayerbe. 2007. Überlegungen zum Begriff der „Affrikata“. In: Magallanes Latas, Fernando (ed.). 2007. Estudios Filológicos Allemanes, Volume 14. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Pp. 49-85.

Affricates are always explained as two sounds that together make up one: diphthongs for consonants, so to speak. An affricate is taken to be composed of a plosive that is released in a fricative. The above article questions whether this definition is really accurate, or whether an affricate is instead one single (albeit articulatorily complex) sound.

According to Linares, there is no total occlusion at the start of an affricate, just very high friction. The first piece of evidence for this is that it is not possible to split up an affricate on an oscillogram into its two supposed component parts (plosive and fricative). The second piece of evidence is the lack of complete silence before an affricate in the middle of or at the end of a word. This can be seen on an oscillogram: there is something resembling a pause, but it includes turbulence, which may belong to the affricate or to the preceding sound.

As a result of this conclusion, the author suggests that a new phonetic characteristic needs to be defined: [α narrow] (this is my translation of the author’s German term “eng”). The reason for this is to differentiate between affricates and fricatives, since both are [+ cont].

This idea makes sense to me. I have analysed my own recordings and could not identify any boundary within the sound [tʃ] in the word <Manchester>. I thought that I could see a silence before this sound, until I compared it with the [t] in the word <glottal>, where the presence of a proper silent pause is undeniable.