Palatal fricatives

In discussing the approximant [j], we noted that there is the possibility of voicelessness + palatality, as in words like ‘pew’. Voiceless palatal fricatives are also common in English as realizations of the sequence /hj/, as in ‘hue’, ‘huge’, ‘human’, etc. This is not surprising: as we have seen, [h] has no associated tongue shape and represents voicelessness. It must be accompanied by some supralaryngeal articulation, and in the case of the sequence [ju] (represented in English orthography as ‘long ’), this means that the accompanying supralaryngeal articulation will be that for a palatal approximant. If this is produced without voicing, there will be greater airflow through the vocal tract, and in turn this will generate friction, resulting in voicelessness, palatality and friction, which is represented as [ç]. Notice that (as with [pj-], etc.) other transcriptions suggest themselves on phonological grounds, such as [hj] or . It may not be a coincidence that there are varieties of English where these words have initial voicing, not voicelessness:  .