Talk:Voiceless dental fricative

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The article right now says that "The voiceless dental fricative is relatively rare among the world's languages." Why is it a rare sound (even though I believe this statement)?

I'm going to remove this statement, as the sound appears in three languages with over 100 million speakers: English, Spanish and Arabic.

Actually, few Spanish speakers have this phoneme, only the peninsulares.Cameron Nedland 02:15, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I find it a bit of an understatement to qualify some three dozen million Castilian Spanish speakers as "a few", don't you think? Surely they don't amount to a majority of the Hispanophone world at large, but they certainly aren't just "a few" and their pronunciation was for long held to be the standard (only recently the seseo pronunciation that lacks this sound has been accepted as standard for the Latin American dialects). 213.37.6.23 17:12, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm Italian, I'd like to know how this consonant sound is pronounced in the plurals (e.g. deaths, baths). I'm not used to it, so please explain. ;)

Older speakers will often change it to the Voiced dental fricative in plurals, for example: one bath /wʌn bæθ/ but, two baths /tu bæðz/. Many younger speakers will keep it the as the voiceless: /tu bæθs/. It just depends on who you talk to.Cameron Nedland 13:53, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

"Many languages, including ... Spanish in Spain, ... lack this sound." I think that should be Spanish in the Americas, because Spanish in most parts of Spain has this sound for the letter z, or c before i or e, hasn't it?

It is completely redundant and nonencyclopedic to have a list of languages that lack the sound and moreover mention the languages that lack it before any languages that have it. It is also completely irrelevant which sound speakers of languages that lack the sound might possibly use to substitute it with. It is simply not encyclopedic information.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 08:26, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

No, it's encyclopedic, and it lists a selection of widely-spoken languages. Perhaps detailing a percentage of the world's languages that have the sound might be in order instead. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 08:57, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

I removed the "citation needed" marker because Wikipedia already has articles concerning those phenomena, with citations of their own. On the other hand, I more or less agree with aeusoes1 in that what we need is the actual percentage, instead of statements that "many languages don't have this sound" which isn't really informative, if not somewhat misleading. The occurrence of this sound isn't so rare that it must be specially mentioned: the voiceless bilabial fricative, for instance, is even rarer in terms of number of languages that have this sound, but nothing is said about it. 石川 (talk) 11:48, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I've restored the citation request. That Wikipedia somewhere cites this information means that it shouldn't be too difficult to cite it in this article. I'm not a fan of citing a fact in only one of the articles it's mentioned. Cite it here as well as there. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 20:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I've added some citations. I'm not certain it'd be a good idea to just copy the citations from each page and to paste them here, but that's the best I can find for now. Also, none of those sources talk about phenomena in non-native accent, so we still lack sources of that kind.石川 (talk) 09:32, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Constructive criticism

Can someone tell me how this sound is represented when English words are written in Katakana? 195.189.142.116 (talk) 09:55, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Is anyone gonna reply to this? 195.189.142.119 (talk) 22:09, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

You might try the Language help desk. They should give you a good answer there. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 01:02, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Equating dental with interdental?

Throughout several of the articles, the idea that dental fricatives "are also known as" interdental consonants is espoused. This despite the fact that they are two separate categories, and a conventional dental fricative can just as easily be pronounced as an interdental fricative. Could someone elaborate? --OneTopJob6 (talk) 19:03, 28 March 2008 (UTC)