Aspiration
Consonants in both English and Tibetan are sometimes pronounced with a burst of air which is called aspiration. Consonants that are pronounced with a burst of air are called aspirated, and consonants that are pronounced without a burst of air are called unaspirated. Aspirated consonants are marked with a small h in the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA).
An example of an aspirated consonant in English is the “p” in the word “pun”. If you hold your hand in front of your mouth and then say the word “pun”, you will notice a burst of air against your hand. For a more visual demonstration, you can hold a piece of paper or a lit candle in front of your mouth instead, and repeat the experiment.
By contrast, the letter “p” in the word “spun” is unaspirated – if you perform the aspiration test above with the word “spun”, you will notice that there is no big burst of air. Next, see if you can drop the “s” in “spun” while still keeping the “p” unaspirated. You should now be saying the word “pun”, but with an unaspirated “p”. It may sound similar to the English letter “b”, but it is actually just an unaspirated “p”, which is a sound that many English speakers aren’t used to hearing in isolation.
By going back and forth between the aspirated and unaspirated “pun”, you can start to train yourself to distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants. You can also practice with other pairs, such as “kill” and “skill” (kh vs. k) or “top” and “stop” (th vs. t). This distinction may be hard to make at first if you’re not used to it, and you may find yourself tensing your throat to avoid making an aspirated sound. However, with practice you can learn how to make unaspirated sounds in a more relaxed way.
Tibetan uses different letters for aspirated and unaspirated sounds, and aspiration helps to distinguish between different words. For example, consider the words ཀ་བ་ kawa (“pillar”) and ཁ་བ་ khawa (“snow”). These words are pronounced the same in every way except for the aspiration of their initial consonant; ཀ་བ་ uses an unaspirated “k” whereas ཁ་བ་ uses an aspirated “k.”
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