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In standard English, the phonetic realization of the two dental fricative phonemes shows less variation than many other English consonants. Both are pronounced either interdentally, with the blade of the tongue resting against the lower part of the back of the upper teeth and the tip protruding slightly, or with the tip of the tongue against the back of the upper teeth.
The voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages.It is familiar to English-speakers as the th sound in father.Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is eth, or ð and was taken from the Old English and Icelandic letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced (inter)dental non-sibilant fricative.
The dental fricative or interdental fricative is a fricative consonant pronounced with the tip of the tongue pressing under the teeth. [1] There are several types (those used in English being written as th):
In most Indigenous Australian languages, there is a series of "dental" consonants, written th, nh, and (in some languages) lh. They are always laminal (pronounced by touching with the blade of the tongue) but may be formed in one of three different ways, depending on the language, the speaker, and how carefully the speaker pronounces the sound.
Th-fronting is the pronunciation of the English "th" as "f" or "v". When th-fronting is applied, becomes or (for example, three is pronounced like free) and becomes or (for example, further is pronounced like fervour). (Here "fronting" refers to the position in the mouth where the sound is produced, not the position of the sound in the word ...
In English there are only two possibilities, voiced and unvoiced. Voicing is caused by the vocal cords held close by each other, so that air passing through them makes them vibrate. All normally spoken vowels are voiced, as are all other sonorants except h, as well as some of the remaining sounds (b, d, g, v, z, zh, j, and the th sound in this).
This sound was regularly realised in Old English as the voiced fricative [ð] between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of [ð] in phonetic alphabets is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed was a popular abbreviation for the word that.
English also uses th to represent the voiced dental fricative /ð/, as in father. This unusual extension of the digraph to represent a voiced sound is caused by the fact that, in Old English, the sounds [θ] and [ð] stood in allophonic relationship to each other and so did not need to be rigorously distinguished in spelling.