Voiceless Dental Fricative
The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some oral languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in thing. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential (see below). 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".
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 upper teeth, as they are with other dental consonants.
Among the more than 60 languages with over 10 million speakers, only English, Standard Arabic, Castilian Spanish (i.e., as spoken in Spain only), Burmese, and Greek have the voiceless dental fricative. 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, voiceless dental stop, or a voiceless labiodental fricative (known respectively as th-alveolarization, th-stopping, and th-fronting.)
The sound is 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 English and Icelandic.
Read more about Voiceless Dental Fricative: Features, Occurrence, Voiceless Alveolar Non-sibilant Fricative
Famous quotes containing the words voiceless and/or dental:
“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)
“[T]hose wholemeal breads ... look hand-thrown, like studio pottery, and are fine if you have all your teeth. But if not, then not. Perhaps the rise ... of the ... factory-made loaf, which may easily be mumbled to a pap betweeen gums, reflects the sorry state of the nation’s dental health.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)