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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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.