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)
“We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the very moment when the sun steps out, and says: “I will the sun to rise”; and at him who cannot stop the wheel, and says: “I will it to roll”; and at him who is taken down in a wrestling match, and says: “I lie here, but I will that I lie here!” And yet, all laughter aside, do we ever do anything other than one of these three things when we use the expression, “I will”?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)