Talk:Voiceless dental fricative

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The article right now says that "The voiceless dental fricative is relatively rare among the world's languages." Why is it a rare sound (even though I believe this statement)?

I'm going to remove this statement, as the sound appears in three languages with over 100 million speakers: English, Spanish and Arabic.

Actually, few Spanish speakers have this phoneme, only the peninsulares.Cameron Nedland 02:15, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I find it a bit of an understatement to qualify some three dozen million Castilian Spanish speakers as "a few", don't you think? Surely they don't amount to a majority of the Hispanophone world at large, but they certainly aren't just "a few" and their pronunciation was for long held to be the standard (only recently the seseo pronunciation that lacks this sound has been accepted as standard for the Latin American dialects). 213.37.6.23 17:12, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm Italian, I'd like to know how this consonant sound is pronounced in the plurals (e.g. deaths, baths). I'm not used to it, so please explain. ;)

Older speakers will often change it to the Voiced dental fricative in plurals, for example: one bath /wʌn bæθ/ but, two baths /tu bæðz/. Many younger speakers will keep it the as the voiceless: /tu bæθs/. It just depends on who you talk to.Cameron Nedland 13:53, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

"Many languages, including ... Spanish in Spain, ... lack this sound." I think that should be Spanish in the Americas, because Spanish in most parts of Spain has this sound for the letter z, or c before i or e, hasn't it?

It is completely redundant and nonencyclopedic to have a list of languages that lack the sound and moreover mention the languages that lack it before any languages that have it. It is also completely irrelevant which sound speakers of languages that lack the sound might possibly use to substitute it with. It is simply not encyclopedic information.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 08:26, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

No, it's encyclopedic, and it lists a selection of widely-spoken languages. Perhaps detailing a percentage of the world's languages that have the sound might be in order instead. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 08:57, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

I removed the "citation needed" marker because Wikipedia already has articles concerning those phenomena, with citations of their own. On the other hand, I more or less agree with aeusoes1 in that what we need is the actual percentage, instead of statements that "many languages don't have this sound" which isn't really informative, if not somewhat misleading. The occurrence of this sound isn't so rare that it must be specially mentioned: the voiceless bilabial fricative, for instance, is even rarer in terms of number of languages that have this sound, but nothing is said about it. 石川 (talk) 11:48, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I've restored the citation request. That Wikipedia somewhere cites this information means that it shouldn't be too difficult to cite it in this article. I'm not a fan of citing a fact in only one of the articles it's mentioned. Cite it here as well as there. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 20:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I've added some citations. I'm not certain it'd be a good idea to just copy the citations from each page and to paste them here, but that's the best I can find for now. Also, none of those sources talk about phenomena in non-native accent, so we still lack sources of that kind.石川 (talk) 09:32, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Constructive criticism

Can someone tell me how this sound is represented when English words are written in Katakana? 195.189.142.116 (talk) 09:55, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Is anyone gonna reply to this? 195.189.142.119 (talk) 22:09, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

You might try the Language help desk. They should give you a good answer there. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 01:02, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Equating dental with interdental?

Throughout several of the articles, the idea that dental fricatives "are also known as" interdental consonants is espoused. This despite the fact that they are two separate categories, and a conventional dental fricative can just as easily be pronounced as an interdental fricative. Could someone elaborate? --OneTopJob6 (talk) 19:03, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Interdental is not wholly separate from dental. It's simply one way of describing a type of laminal dental consonants. Sometimes it's too specific so that, for example, English /ð/ is pronounced with the tip of the tongue at the teeth in British varieties but is more interdental in American English. Don't quote me on that, though. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 00:57, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

What happened to apico-dental?

There might not be much variation out there in terms of articulator, but shouldn't the tip of the tongue be mentioned in the description? It's a voiceless apico-dental fricative. allolex (talk) 16:02, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

It's not always apical, even within a language. English, for example, varies from dialect to dialect between apical and laminal. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 20:30, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

"TH" sound

I am not surprised it has died out in some languages. Who wants to keep biting their tongues? 192.12.88.7 (talk) 02:37, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, English speakers have done it for quite some time. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 03:13, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Icelandic example

Can someone provide an example from Icelandic, perhaps? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.130.188.69 (talk) 15:21, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

It's in the article. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 23:56, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, then the sound is only present in Icelandic as a voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative and not simply as a voiceless dental fricative? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.130.178.47 (talk) 10:23, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, as far as I know anyway. It's a subtle distinction. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 00:29, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Me: Not sure if by Icelandic that they oughtn't have said ancient norse? As in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) ? Sorry, new everywhere. -1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.181.117.91 (talk) 10:49, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Icelandic uses the voiced dental fricative in Ð/ð, the voiceless dental fricative in Þ/þ, and the voiceless alveolar fricative (harder to exemplify, but it appears in words at the end like "maður" and "flugvél"). Icelandic should be included on this page as Þ is one of the most common sounds in Icelandic. Chaanders (talk) 19:20, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Contradiction in the denti-alveolar sibilant

The description of the denti-alveolar sibilant as it stands is contradictory. We have »Its place of articulation is denti-alveolar...« but »It is normally apical«. The problem is that a denti-alveolar consonant is by defintion laminal, not apical. The whole section is unsourced, so I can’t check which statement is wrong, but I suspect it’s the assertion of apicality. Can anyone shed any light on this? —Vorziblix (talk) 05:17, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

It's not unsourced, read it again. Peter238 (talk) 12:11, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Ah yes, you’re right. The source has »The tongue tip rests against the back of the upper front teeth, and the groove for the air escape is formed in the tongue blade (or corona) where it rests in the area of the upper teeth sockets, gum line, and alveolar ridge«, so the sound seems to indeed be laminal, not apical; I’ll fix the article accordingly. —Vorziblix (talk) 15:15, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Turkic

I removed this paragraph from the lead:

Among Turkic languages, Bashkir and Turkmen have the voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative.

with the edit summary "no particular reason to mention Turkic languages (with < 10m speakers) having this sound". @Dabblequeen: reverted, saying: "I don't understand why that would be not necessary. Someone wanting to know that would appreciate that information." As I said in my edit summary, I see no particular reason to mention these languages in the lead; they are already covered in the "Occurrence" table, and there's nothing special about Turkic as opposed to Afro-Asiatic or Austronesian etc. to justify its inclusion in the lead. If it's useful to group languages by family in this article (I don't think it is), we could add a column to the table that allows users to sort by language family. Surely we're not going to add a paragraph to the lead for each language family. --Macrakis (talk) 18:01, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Brythonic

Breton doesn't have it so this is a bit misleading. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:8A8B:1600:2478:CBD2:B262:3D36 (talk) 18:55, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Could sonemone add the sámi languages?

North sámi has both voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives, Example: Ruoŧas (Sweden). Skolt sámi also has a voiced dental fricative such as in "ođđmuõtt" (snow). I don't know how to edit this so if someone could do it that'd be fantastic — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.174.176.243 (talk) 18:10, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

English occurrences....

In the "occurrences" sections, it lists a couple dialects (RP & Western American) as having this sound, but as far as I know just about every dialect of English pronounces words like "thin" and "think" with this sound....The only possible exception I can think of is Irish English, where it's sometimes pronounced more like a T - especially if it's blended with an R, such that the number 3 is often pronounced as "tree." But aside from that, it's rather universal - certainly in Eastern American English, non-RP British dialects, Aus and NZ English, etc. So I'd recommend getting rid of those dialects and just having it listed as an across the board usage. -2003:CA:870C:E9F:9DEE:D792:643D:BE7B (talk) 21:56, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

/θ, ð/ are pretty unstable, see Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩. Nardog (talk) 07:33, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

The article you linked doesn't show that the TH sound isn't pronounced in the Eastern US, or in AUS, NZ, CA, etc. I'm gonna go ahead and edit the article, as "most dialects" is more accurate, since the sound is still quite widespread and standard, despite its absence in some more colloquial dialects. In a hundred years or so, that might well change, but for now it's still very much the mainstream pronunciation. -2003:CA:8717:9F55:FF21:3CFC:A51F:A3B9 (talk) 15:19, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Emilian-Romagnol

The claim that /θ/ is part of the Emilian phonemic inventory is false. Most dialects of Emilian do not feature /θ/ or /ð/. The cited source is unreliable in its choice of phonemic representation, but it does specify that there is a difference between the English /θ/ and the sound represented in Emilian by <z>:

"La sola differenza è che il th inglese si articola con la lingua fra i denti oppure dietro i denti superiori (è “a punta alta”), mentre la z bolognese si produce dietro i denti inferiori (“a punta bassa”)." Translated: "the only difference is that the English th is pronounced with the tongue between one's teeth or right behind the upper teeth (raised tongue tip), while the Bolgonese z is pronounced behind the lower teeth (lowered tongue tip)".

In other words, /θ/ is a non-sibilant, apical fricative; the fricative found in most Emilian dialects (including the cited Bolognese) is a laminal sibilant, better described as /s̪/ or as /s̻̪/ - in other words, the same sound found in Andalusian Spanish, according to this same article. It is true that some speakers realize it as [θ], but this is considered non-standard pronunciation, if not a speech impediment entirely. It is also quite evident that this pronunciation is non-standard because Emilian speakers have trouble learning to pronounce the English th, and end up realizing it as - you guessed it - [s̻̪], which they most definitely wouldn't if /θ/ was a sound present in the phonemic inventory of their own language.

I didn't change the article itself because I have no better source than "I am a native Emilian speaker and I also speak English". If someone can find something, please fix the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.10.42.226 (talk) 18:03, 28 November 2023 (UTC)