Voiceless dental fricative
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The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is θ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is T. The IPA symbol is the Greek letter theta, which is used for this sound in Greek, and the sound is thus often referred to as "theta". It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in thing.
The dental 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 teeth, as they are with other dental consonants.
Many languages, including widely-spoken ones such as German, Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, as well as all Slavic languages, some dialects of English, and the seseante dialects of Spanish, lack this sound. Speakers of such languages and dialects sometimes have difficulty producing or distinguishing it from similar sounds, and typically replace it with a voiceless alveolar fricative, voiceless dental plosive, or a voiceless labiodental fricative (known respectively as th-alveolarization,[1] th-stopping,[2] and th-fronting.[3])
Features
Features of the voiceless dental fricative:
Occurrence
Voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative
The voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative is a consonantal sound. As the International Phonetic Alphabet does not have separate symbols for the alveolar consonants (the same symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that aren't palatalized), it can represent this sound as in a number of ways including < θ̠ >, <θ͇> (retracted or alveolarized θ, respectively), or < ɹ̝̊ > (constricted voiceless ɹ).
Features
- Its manner of articulation is simple fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence, but without the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant.
- Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
- Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
- It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
- It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
- The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.
Occurrence
See also
References
Bibliography
- Marotta, Giovanna; Barth, Marlen (2005), "Acoustic and sociolingustic aspects of lenition in Liverpool English", Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 3 (2): 377-413
- Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio; Fernández-Planas, Ana Ma.; Carrera-Sabaté, Josefina (2003), "Castilian Spanish", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 33 (2): 255-259
- Thelwall, Robin (1990), "Illustrations of the IPA: Arabic", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 20 (2): 37-41
- Wells, John C (1982), Accents of English, second, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-24224-X
