Ejective Consonant - Description

Description

In producing an ejective, the stylohyoid muscle and digastric muscle contract—causing the hyoid bone and the connected glottis to raise—while the forward articulation (at the velum in the case of ) is held, raising air pressure greatly in the mouth, so that when the oral articulators separate, there is a dramatic burst of air. The Adam's apple may be seen moving when the sound is pronounced. In the languages where they are more obvious, ejectives are often described as sounding like "spat" consonants; but ejectives are often quite weak and, in some contexts, and in some languages, are easy to mistake for tenuis or even voiced stops. These weakly ejective articulations are sometimes called intermediates in older American linguistic literature and are notated with different phonetic symbols: ⟨C!⟩ = strongly ejective, ⟨Cʼ⟩ = weakly ejective. Strong and weak ejectives have not been found to be contrastive in any language.

In strict, technical terms, ejectives are glottalic egressive consonants. The most common ejective is, not because it is easier to produce than other ejectives like or (it isn't) but because the auditory distinction between and is greater than with other ejectives and voiceless consonants of the same place of articulation. In proportion to the frequency of uvular consonants, is even more common, as would be expected from the very small oral cavity used to pronounce a voiceless uvular stop., on the other hand, is quite rare. This is the opposite pattern to what is found in the implosive consonants, in which the bilabial is common and the velar is rare. Ejective fricatives are rare for presumably the same reason: with the air escaping from the mouth while the pressure is being raised, like inflating a leaky bicycle tire, it is harder to distinguish the resulting sound as salient as a .