Aspiration (phonetics) in the context of "Φ"

Phi (/ˈfaɪ, ˈfiː/ FY, FEE; uppercase Φ, lowercase φ or ϕ; Ancient Greek: ϕεῖ pheî [pʰéî̯]; Modern Greek: φι fi [fi]) is the twenty-first letter of the Greek alphabet.

In Archaic and Classical Greek (c. 9th to 4th century BC), it represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive ([pʰ]), which was the origin of its usual romanization as ⟨ph⟩. During the later part of Classical Antiquity, in Koine Greek (c. 4th century BC to 4th century AD), its pronunciation shifted to a voiceless bilabial fricative ([ɸ]), and by the Byzantine Greek period (c. 4th century AD to 15th century AD) it developed its modern pronunciation as a voiceless labiodental fricative ([f]).The romanization of the Modern Greek phoneme is therefore usually ⟨f⟩.

Igbo (English: /ˈiːboʊ/ EE-boh, US also /ˈɪɡboʊ/ IG-boh; Standard Igbo: Ásụ̀sụ́ Ìgbò [ásʊ̀sʊ̀ ìɡ͡bò] ) is the principal native language cluster of the Igbo people, an ethnicity in the Southeastern part of Nigeria.

Igbo languages are spoken by a total of 31 million people. The number of Igboid languages depends on how one classifies a language versus a dialect, so there could be around 35 different Igbo languages. The core Igbo cluster, or Igbo proper, is generally thought to be one language but there is limited mutual intelligibility between the different groupings (north, west, south and east). A standard literary language termed 'Igbo izugbe' (meaning "general igbo") was generically developed and later adopted around 1972, with its core foundation based on the Orlu (Isu dialects), Anambra (Awka dialects) and Umuahia (Ohuhu dialects), omitting the nasalization and aspiration of those varieties.

Osage (/oʊˈseɪdʒ, ˈoʊseɪdʒ/; Osage: 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 𐒻𐒷‎ Wažáže ie) is a Siouan language spoken by the people of the Osage Nation in northern Oklahoma. Their original territory was in the present-day Ohio River Valley, which they shared with other Siouan language nations. Slowly they migrated to present-day Missouri and Kansas areas (see Dhegihan migration), but they were gradually pushed west by pressure from invading colonial forces and settlement by other displaced Native American nations.

Osage has an inventory of sounds very similar to that of Dakota, also a Siouan language, plus vowel length, preaspirated obstruents and an interdental fricative (like "th" in English "then"). In contrast to Dakota, phonemically aspirated obstruents appear phonetically as affricates, and the high back vowel *u has been fronted to [y].

In linguistics, a tenuis consonant (/ˈtɛn.juːɪs/ or /ˈtɛnuːɪs/) is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized.

In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of [p, t, ts, tʃ, k] with a voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as Spanish p, t, ch, k or English p, t, k after s (spy, sty, sky).

In phonetics, preaspiration (sometimes spelled pre-aspiration) is a period of voicelessness or aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless obstruent, basically equivalent to an [h]-like sound preceding the obstruent. In other words, when an obstruent is preaspirated, the glottis is opened for some time before the obstruent closure. To mark preaspiration using the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for regular aspiration, ⟨ʰ⟩, can be placed before the preaspirated consonant. However, Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:70) prefer to use a simple cluster notation, e.g. ⟨hk⟩ instead of ⟨ʰk⟩.

Bartholomae's law, sometimes referred to as the Buddha rule, is a Proto-Indo-European sound law affecting consonant clusters, most clearly in the Indo-Iranian languages. It states that in a cluster of two or more obstruents (stops or the sibilant *s), any one of which is a voiced aspirated stop anywhere in the sequence, the whole cluster becomes voiced and aspirated. Thus, to the Proto-Indo-European root *bʰewdʰ- 'learn, become aware of', the participle *bʰudʰ-to- 'enlightened' loses the aspiration of the first stop (following Grassmann's law) and with the application of Bartholomae's law and regular vowel changes gives Sanskrit buddha 'enlightened'. The law is named after German linguist Christian Bartholomae, who first described it in 1883.

Grassmann's law, named after its discoverer Hermann Grassmann, is a dissimilatory phonological process in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which states that if an aspirated consonant is followed by another aspirated consonant in the next syllable, the first one loses the aspiration. The descriptive version was given for Sanskrit by Pāṇini.

Here are some examples in Greek of the effects of Grassmann's law: