Jump to content

Voiced dental fricative

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 84.120.160.71 (talk) at 15:43, 4 June 2008. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

IPA number131
Audio sample
Encoding
X-SAMPAD
Image

The voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound, eth, is ð, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is D. The symbol ð was taken from the Old English letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced interdental fricative. This symbol is also sometimes used to represent the dental approximant, though that is more clearly written with the lowering diacritic, ð̞. 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 teeth, as they are with other dental consonants. It is familiar to English speakers as the th sound in then.

This sound, and its unvoiced counterpart, are actually rare phonemes. Almost all European and Asian languages, such as German, French, Persian, Japanese, and Chinese, lack this sound. Native speakers of those languages in which the sound is not present often have difficulty enunciating or distinguishing it, and replace it with a voiced alveolar fricative or a voiced dental plosive. As for Europe, there seems to be a great arc where this sound (and/or the unvoiced variant) is present. Most of mainland Europe lacks the sound; however, the "periphery" languages of Welsh, English, Spanish, Arabic, some Italian dialects, Greek and Albanian have this phoneme in their consonant inventories.

Features

Features of the voiced dental fricative:

Occurrence

In the following transcriptions, the undertack diacritic may be used to indicate an approximant [ð̞].

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Albanian i verdhë [i vɛːɾð] 'gold'
Aleut Atkan dialect dax̂ [ðɑχ] 'eye'
Arabic Standard[1] ذهب [ðaˈhab] 'gold' See Arabic phonology
Berta [fɛ̀ːðɑ̀nɑ́] 'to sweep'
Catalan[2] cadàver [kəˈðaβə] 'cadaver' See Catalan phonology
Danish vide [ˈʋiːðə] 'to know' See Danish phonology
Elfdalian baiða [ˈbaɪða] 'wait'
English this [ðɪs] 'this' See English phonology
Fijian ciwa [ðiwa] 'nine'
Greek δάφνη [ˈðafni] 'laurel' See Modern Greek phonology
Gwich’in niidhàn [niːðân] 'you want'
Harsusi [ðebeːr] 'bee'
Hän ë̀dhä̀ [ə̂ðɑ̂] 'hide'
Kabyle uḇ [ðuβ] 'to be exhausted'
Occitan Gascon que divi [ke ˈðiwi] 'what I should'
Sioux Nakota ? [ˈðaptã] 'five'
Sardinian nidu [ˡniðu] 'nest'
Spanish[3] Standard Spanish de'do [d̪e̞ð̞o̞] 'finger'
Castilian Spanish juzgar [χu'ðɣ̞aɾ] 'to judge'
Tanacross dhet [ðet] 'liver'
Tutchone Northern edhó [eðǒ] 'hide'
Southern adhǜ [aðɨ̂]
Welsh bardd [bɑrð] 'bard'
Western Neo-Aramaic ? [aħːað] 'one'

References

  1. ^ Thelwall (1990:37)
  2. ^ Carbonell & Llisterri (1992:55)
  3. ^ Martínez-Celdrán et al (2003:255)

Bibliography

See also