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θ
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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 post-classical Greek, and the sound is thus often referred to as "theta".
The dental non-sibilant 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 or lower teeth, as they are with other dental consonants.
Among the more than 60 languages with over 10 million speakers, only English, Modern Standard Arabic and Modern Aramaic (only some speakers), European standard Spanish, Burmese, and Greek have the voiceless dental non-sibilant 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 (/s/), voiceless dental stop (/t/), or a voiceless labiodental fricative (/f/; known respectively as th-alveolarization, th-stopping,[1] and th-fronting[2]).
Among Turkic languages, Bashkir and Turkmen have voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative.
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, but it is alveolar in the latter.[3][4]
Features of the voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative:
The voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant is the only sibilant fricative in some dialects of Andalusian Spanish. It has no official symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, though its features would be transcribed ⟨s̻̪⟩. It is usually represented by an ad-hoc symbol such as ⟨s̄⟩, ⟨θˢ̣⟩, or ⟨s̟⟩ (advanced diacritic).
Dalbor (1980) describes this sound as follows: "[s̄] is a voiceless, corono-dentoalveolar groove fricative, the so-called s coronal or s plana because of the relatively flat shape of the tongue body.... To this writer, the coronal [s̄], heard throughout Andalusia, should be characterized by such terms as "soft," "fuzzy," or "imprecise," which, as we shall see, brings it quite close to one variety of /θ/ … Canfield has referred, quite correctly, in our opinion, to this [s̄] as "the lisping coronal-dental," and Amado Alonso remarks how close it is to the post-dental [θ̦], suggesting a combined symbol [θˢ̣] to represent it."
Features of the voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant:
French language, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Catalan language
Manner of articulation, Labial consonant, Palatal consonant, Epiglottal consonant, Phonation
Greek alphabet, Greece, Cyprus, Armenia, Christianity
Place of articulation, Manner of articulation, ɾ̼, International Phonetic Alphabet, Sibilant consonant
International Phonetic Alphabet, Place of articulation, Manner of articulation, ɾ̼, Language
Hebrew language, Niqqud, Pharyngealization, Voiceless alveolar stop, Voiceless velar stop
Ἀ, American English, Greek language, Latin alphabet, Sigma
Unicode, Utf-8, Tau, Utf-16, Numeric character reference