Voiceless dental fricative
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A voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to most English speakers as the 'th' in think. Though rather rare as a phoneme among the world's languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential ones. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is Template:Angbr IPA. The IPA symbol is the lowercase Greek letter theta, which is used for this sound in post-classical Greek, and the sound is thus often referred to as "theta".
Dental non-sibilant fricatives are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth, and not just against the back of the upper or lower teeth, as they are with other dental consonants.
These sounds and their voiced counterparts are uncommon as phonemes, occurring in 4% of languages in a phonological analysis of 2,155 languages.<ref>Phoible.org. (2018). PHOIBLE Online - Segments. [online] Available at: http://phoible.org/parameters.</ref> Among the more than 60 languages with over 10 million speakers, only English, northern varieties of the Berber languages of North Africa, Standard Peninsular Spanish, various dialects of Arabic, Swahili (in words derived from Arabic), and Greek have the voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative.Template:Citation needed Speakers of languages and dialects without the sound sometimes have difficulty producing or distinguishing it from similar sounds, especially if they have had no chance to acquire it in childhood, and typically replace it with a voiceless alveolar fricative (Template:IPA) (as in Indonesian), voiceless dental stop (Template:IPA), or a voiceless labiodental fricative (Template:IPA); known respectively as th-alveolarization, th-stopping,<ref>Template:Harvcoltxt</ref> and th-fronting.<ref>Template:Harvcoltxt</ref>
These sounds are known to have disappeared from a number of languages, e.g. from most of the Germanic languages or dialects, where it is retained only in Scots, English, and Icelandic, but it is alveolar in the last of these.<ref>Template:Harvcoltxt, cited in Template:Harvcoltxt</ref><ref>Template:Harvcoltxt</ref> Among non-Germanic Indo-European languages as a whole, the sound was also once much more widespread, but is today preserved in a few languages including the Brythonic languages, Peninsular Spanish, Galician, Venetian, Tuscan, Albanian, some Occitan dialects and Greek. It has likewise disappeared from many modern vernacular varieties of Arabic, like Egyptian Arabic. Standard Arabic, and various dialects like Mesopotamian Arabic still retain the sound and its voiced counterpart Template:IPA. Similarly, with Spanish, it is only found in most parts of Spain, including in the standard pronunciation, but has almost entirely disappeared from Latin America.
On the other hand, there are a very few languages, including Turkmen and Standard Zhuang, where these sounds have replaced /s/ and are even spelled with "s" or its orthographic equivalent.
Features
File:Voiceless dental fricative articulation.svg
Features of a voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative:
Template:Fricative It does not have the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant. Template:Dental Template:Voiceless Template:Oral Template:Central articulation Template:Pulmonic
Occurrence
Voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant
The voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant is the only sibilant fricative in some dialects of Andalusian Spanish. It has no official symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, though its features would be transcribed Template:Angbr IPA or Template:Angbr IPA (using the Template:Angbr IPA, the diacritic marking a laminal consonant, and Template:Angbr IPA, the diacritic marking a dental consonant). It is usually represented by an ad-hoc symbol such as Template:Angbr IPA, Template:Angbr IPA, or Template:Angbr IPA (advanced diacritic).
Template:Harvcoltxt describes this sound as follows: "Template:IPA is a voiceless, corono-dentoalveolar groove fricative, the so-called s coronal or s plana because of the relatively flat shape of the tongue body.... To this writer, the coronal Template:IPA, heard throughout Andalusia, should be characterized by such terms as "soft," "fuzzy," or "imprecise," which, as we shall see, brings it quite close to one variety of Template:IPA ... Canfield has referred, quite correctly, in our opinion, to this Template:IPA as "the lisping coronal-dental," and Amado Alonso remarks how close it is to the post-dental Template:IPA, suggesting a combined symbol Template:IPA to represent it".
Features
Features of the voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant:
- Its place of articulation is denti-alveolar, which means it is articulated with a flat tongue against the alveolar ridge and upper teeth.
- It is normally laminal, which means it is pronounced with the blade of the tongue.<ref name=Dalbor>Template:Harvcoltxt</ref>
Template:Voiceless Template:Oral Template:Fricative Template:Pulmonic
Occurrence
| Language | Word | IPA | Meaning | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | Andalusian<ref name=Dalbor /> | Template:Lang | Template:IPA | 'house' | Present in dialects with ceceo. See Spanish phonology |
See also
- Voiced dental fricative
- Voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative
- Voiced dental sibilant
- Voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant
- Sibilant consonant#Possible combinations
- Pronunciation of English th
- Index of phonetics topics
Notes
References
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