Talk:Sibilant consonant

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Could someone please clarify the relationship between this and fricative? -- SS 03:02, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A sibilant is a type of fricative that has a high "second formant" spike on its waveform. Basically, what it means is that there's a distinct "whistling" sound that can be heard in a sibilant. But sibilants are just a subset of fricatives that have unusual phonetic properties. thefamouseccles 03:12, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

In articulation, a sibilant has a narrow channel in the tongue that other fricatives lack. You can have a non-sibilant alveolar fricative, for instance; this is transcribed as a raised approximant (a turned 'r' with a "tack" under it). kwami 10:36, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)

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The sibilant/non-sibilant distinction is especially important in English. Most people consciously know that to pluralize a regular English noun, they simply add an -s to it. But what they know only subconciously is that English plurals can take three forms (allomorphs), those being [s], [z], and [əz]. [s] occurs after most voiceless sounds, and [z] occurs after most voiced sounds. The sequence [əz] fills in the rest, and occurs after sibilants, i.e. [s, z, ʃ, ʒ]. Thus, distinguishing between sibilants and non-sibilants is extremely important in English.

I removed this, because this phenomenon is merely a process of inserting an epenthetic schwa to avoid two consecutive instances of the same consonant. The same thing happens when one adds the past tense suffix -ed to a word: when the last letter is not t or d, we can just tack the suffix on: ease ([i:z]) + -ed produces phonetic [i:zd], but if we try it with raid ([rejd]), then we say [rejdəd] and not [rejd:]. It has nothing to do with sibilants. thefamouseccles 03:17, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] English plural sibilant distinction

Just to be clear, English nouns ending in a sibilant take the plural allomorph [ez]. thefamouseccles, you are exactly correct in your assesment of the english past tense, that verbs ending in t and d take the past tense [ed]. However, the plural situation is different, because a word like JUDGE which ends in an affricate -- which can be a sibilant because it shares qualities of fricatives -- still gets the [ez] plural allomorph. Even if you just wanted to look at the fricative part, you end up with just the [ʒ] sound (like in 'genre'), which is hardly found in English at all. So, it isn't about avoiding two consecutive instances of the same consonant, though that is what the past tense is.

peace.

I'm taking this back out. Thefamouseccles is correct: the epenthetic schwa breaks up sequences of similar consonants. What's going on with the sibilants is no different from what's going on with the past tense: the schwa comes between sequences of coronals, whether fricatives or stops. This demonstrates the unity of the articulatory category "coronal", but not "sibilant". kwami 10:27, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)

[edit] Grooved fricative

Are "sibilant" and "grooved fricative" synonymous? --Ptcamn 07:59, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe they are. kwami 07:16, 25 April 2006 (UTC)