The voiceless alveolar stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar stops is ⟨t⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t. The dental stop can be distinguished with the underbridge diacritic, ⟨t̪⟩, the postalveolar with a retraction line, ⟨t̠⟩, and the Extensions to the IPA have a double underline diacritic which can be used to explicitly specify an alveolar pronunciation, ⟨t͇⟩.
The sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically; the most common consonant phonemes of the world's languages are, and . Most languages have at least a plain, and some distinguish more than one variety. Some languages without a are Hawaiian (outside of Ni‘ihau; Hawaiian uses a voiceless velar stop when adopting loanwords with ), colloquial Samoan (which also lacks an ), and Nǁng of South Africa.
Read more about Voiceless Alveolar Stop: Features, Varieties, Occurrence
Famous quotes containing the words voiceless and/or stop:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“I don’t go that fast in practice, because I need the excitement of the race, the adrenalin. The others might train more and be in better shape, but when I’m racing, I put winning before everything else. I don’t stop until the world gets gray and fuzzy around the edges.”
—Candi Clark (b. c. 1950)