The voiceless bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɸ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is p\.
Features
Features of the voiceless bilabial fricative:
This consonant is lacking in English, and English speakers will often pronounce voiceless labiodental fricative when speaking a language that has it, while speakers of a language that has it may use it in place of English 'f'.
In other languages
Modern Greek has [ɸ] as a phoneme. It is represented by φ (phi). This is in contrast to Ancient Greek, where φ stood for aspirated p.
Mishnaic Hebrew has [ɸ] as a phoneme. It is represented by פ (pe). This is in contrast to Modern Hebrew, in which this letter represents [p] or [f].
Japanese has [ɸ] as a phone which is an allophone of /h/ before /u/. It is usually romanized in Romaji as f.
Korean has [ɸ] as a phone which is an allophone of /h/ before /u/.
See also
