English has two TH sounds (one voiced? is that the right term?, and one not). I think Castilian Spanish also has the unvoiced one.
Are those the only languages that have the unvoiced TH? Is English the only one with the voiced one?
When people speak English with a foreign accent, those sounds seem to really trip them up (D or Z for voiced TH, S or T for unvoiced). Just curious how unique those sounds are to English.
Here’s all the languages that use the unvoiced th sound:
Here’s the ones that use the voiced one:
Standard Arabic and Greek seem to be the big ones.
Thanks! I’m not enough of a linguist to parse most of those wiki pages and whether the sound in other languages is the same – there are so many notes on those tables!
The ones that came to my mind were Welsh (spelt “dd” as in Dafydd) and Spanish (“z”- “Una cerveza, por favor”), but thanks for the authoritative link.
Top of my mind is Icelandic what has separate letters for them, Þ and ð
But apparently not in Swedish, at least not since the ancient days of Old Norse where it was represented by the thorn character Þ. Swedish-born airline captain Petter Hörnfeldt, who produces a lot of aviation videos on YouTube under the banner “Mentour Pilot”, has a moderate
accent that I presume is Swedish. When he talks about “engine thrust” or “thrust levers” it always sounds a lot like “trust”.
BTW, Petter is an absolutely marvelous fellow and extremely knowledgeable, and makes these videos with the noble goal of instilling better safety practices in present and aspiring pilots.
Fun fact: in the faux-old-timey descriptor “ye olde,” the y in “ye” is meant to represent the first of those characters (a.k.a. “thorn”) as it existed in Old English.
I remember having difficulty with these sounds when I was learning some Greek years ago.
It seemed subtle but distinctively different.
I wonder if we have any native Greek speakers here. The IPA symbols are the same, but there can still be some variation, as there are various degrees of precision and extended symbol sets in IPA (and also it may depend on dialect.)
Sort of like the soft CH sound in German (ich, durstig), which is almost, but not quite, an SH in English.
The Welsh one – is that voiced or no?
I had some difficulty with the letter Delta. It was a softer, voiced fricative sound very similar to the English “th” (this, that) but not a hard “d” as in dog. It was a combination of the 2 sounds which created some difficulty.
So I formed the “th” sound with my mouth/tongue but voiced the d sound.
Another Greek letter, Theta, sounded more similar to the “this, that, bath” sound we use in English.
That’s all I recall and this was many years ago so I could be way off the pronunciation norm for this letter/language.
A very similar situation.
I experienced some difficulty when learning to pronounce certain German words.
A Bengali friend told me of a set of 4 phonemes in Hindi (IIRC) – aspirated D, aspirated voiced dental fricative, unaspirated versions… I’m probably mis-remembering (since I couldn’t reliably distinguish the sounds.) Anybody here know about them?
BTW, the German sound of “ch” varies with dialect; my parents’ Austrian German had a guttural version.
The Bavarian accent also had a bit of a guttural component. I believe the two dialects have similarities.
Welsh also has separate letters for them. Th (considered a single letter, and alphabetized after T) is the unvoiced as in “thin”; Dd (considered a single letter, and alphabetized after D) is the voiced one, as in “this.”
Those are two different sounds. It is voiced in the first two words and unvoiced in the last.
Yep. This, that, bathe are voiced. Bath (no e) is not.
Disclaimer:
My grandfather and grandmother came off the boat from Greece, and my father spoke Greek until he went to kindergarten, then had to learn English very quickly. But my father died when I was young and my Greek language skills are a bit limited. There is also a fair amount of difference between the Greek language spoken in West Virginia and the Greek language spoken in Greece.
Greek has two “TH” letters.
The first is the letter Theta (uppercase Θ lowercase θ). In my experience, this is pronounced exactly like the English “TH” in “thin”.
The second is the letter Delta (uppercase Δ lowercase δ). This sound is sometimes translated as “TH” (the same sound as in “the”) and sometimes as “D”. In my experience, it’s more of a combination of the two. It is sometimes written as “DH” when converted to English sounds. I have noticed that a lot of Americanized Greeks (like me) lean more towards the “D” sound. Many English speakers are familiar with the word “delta”, but in Greek the word is pronounced more like “thelta”, and you might be tempted to write the pronunciation as “dhelta”.
As I understand it, in ancient Greek, theta was pronounced more like the “TH” in “the” and delta was pronounced more like the English “D”, but those sounds shifted over time.
To get the “D” sound as in “dog”, modern Greek uses the letter combination “ντ” (nu tau). For example, the Greek word for tomato is “ντομάτα” (ntomata) and is pronounced “domata”. However, when used at the end of a word, “ντ” is pronounced like the English “nd”.
To mega-nitpick, yes they have two separate letters, as English used to have. But the sounds in Icelandic are /θ̠/ and /ð̠/ in IPA-ese, with the little line under it. Alveolar instead of dental.
Among letters, modern Faroese has “only” Ð/ð.