Talk:Dental consonant

I'm a native Italian speaker and I hardly ever pronounce L as dental, and pronounce N more often alveolar than dental.

dental vs laminal

I had a *** of a time with French front rounded vowels until I came across the teachers' edition of some 1950s highschool French textbook that described a laminal alveolar articulation for the "dental" consonants (while still calling them "dental", I believe). Within minutes my problem with the vowels disappeared. I've since corroborated this description with Ladefoged and with linguists who know French.

Can't comment on Italian. But without front rounded vowels, I'd think that minor mispronounciation of the alveolar consonants isn't likely to garble your speech the way it can in French. kwami 00:02, 2005 May 21 (UTC)

Spanish?

If the Spanish t, d, n, and l are not actually dental, then why are four of the examples of dentals from Spanish?

This needs to be cleaned up. Some day. Most sounds described as dental are laminal, and usually contact the front of the alveolar ridge. However, there are also true laminal alveolars further back on the ridge, as well as (e.g. in Australia) true laminal dentals, where the tip of the tongue may be against the lower teeth. The Romance languages are of the intermediate articulation that Ladefoged calls denti-alveolar. This are much more common than the other two articulations, and provides the most familiar examples. kwami 07:01, 2005 August 7 (UTC)

I don't know that "Romance Stops" qualifies one consistent classification. I have heard of the traditional description of French stops as "Lamino-dental" while they are actually "lamino-alveolar," but in Spanish the oral stops are apico-dental while the nasal stop (and lateral approximant) are apico-alveolar. The difference is highly evident when listening to a French accent, where English alveolar stops can sound almost affricated with the laminal articulation, whereas this is in no way characteristic of a Spanish accent. --Coyne025 03:55, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Disambiguation

I reverted the change to the disambiguation note, because when we try to make the term "Dental" point *only* to "Dental consonant", the robots start making some very bizarre auto changes throughout the system (for example, Dental assistant gets redirected to Dental consonant). It is my belief that keeping the disambiguation note the way that it is, is the best way to avoid confusion. --Elonka 17:12, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Advice: voiceless dental sibilant

A wikipedia article about voiceless and voiced dental sibilant is still needed

Edits

I made some overall edits to the article, since I felt that it had a strong Francophilic bias, calling the coronal stops of French "Romance Stops," while the stops in French are something of a peculiarity among the Romance languages. The older article had a overtone that seemed to express that since they don't occur in French, true dental sounds are therefore quite rare ("Nevertheless, apical dentals occur in some languages" while an article discussing their existence shouldn't make them seem less favorable than laminals), while my edit cites their existence both phonemically and alophonically in Spanish. A lot of the article referred to French examples, much of which I left, since it is a good way to show the difference between true dentals and the comparable sounds in English. It seemed odd to leave the old examples since the point is that these French stops are actually NOT good examples of dental consonants. I didn't wait for discussing since this particular article doesn't seem to get a lot of traffic, but I'd be happy to explain any changes I made.--Coyne025 19:37, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

confused

How exactly can someone claim that the English 'd/t/n/l' is articulated differently from the Italian 'd/t/n/l'? Can the difference be heard over a noisy phone line? If an English and an Italian had a child, would his/her pronunciation of 'd/t/n/l' be French (denti-alevolar, as the article claims)? 219.77.98.166 04:09, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

English and Italian /t/ and /d/ are articulated differently in that in English these sounds are produced by touching the tongue to the alveolar ridge just behind the top teeth and in Italian these sounds are produced by touching the tongue to the top row of teeth. I would imagine that the difference would be perceptible over a phone line. As for the child, it would be very unlikely for him to "merge" these sounds since children have a remarkable ability for hearing and distinguishing between sounds. The child would produce the stops as Dental while speaking Italian and as Alveolar when speaking English. /n/ and /l/ are generally alveolar in both languages, although they would generally be dentalized before a dental consonant in both languages as well. Coyne025 23:00, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Fricatives

If dentals are to be distinguished from a sound in which contact is made with the tongue then why is Theta which is listed in the table considered a dental?

Cakeandicecream 20:46, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't really understand your question... all sounds discussed in this article are articulated using the tongue. If you're referring to the difference between dentals in a language like Spanish and what are called "dentals" in French, the difference is not only what part of the tongue makes contact (tip in Spanish, blade in French) and where (teeth in Spanish, alveolar ridge in French). The tongue can also touch the teeth using either the tip or the blade, which illustrates the difference between the realizations of /ð/ in English (in a word such as father, where the fricative is lamino-dental or interdental) and a language like Spanish (in a word such as hada, fairy, where the d is articulated as an apico-dental fricative). Have I cleared anything up?