Noticing that foreigners (ie non english native speakers) can never seem to pronounce our voiced and voiceless “this” and “that”-- It seems to really be beyond non-th speakers to ever get it right. Even people that have otherwise perfect accents, I can tell their one flaw is ‘dis or dat’.
And noticing other languages that I know of don’t seem to have any ‘th’ sounds, with the bizarre exception of Castellano Spanish,
shall I ask – are we the only ‘th’ people around? How uncommon is it, and what the hell-- how did it start up?
“Th” is actually two sounds, the voiceless interdental fricative (represented by the greek letter theta, Θ), and the voiced interdental fricative (represented by eth). They are formed by putting your tongue between your teeth. Wiki says that it is lacking in many common languages, but Arabic, Greek, and others have it.
Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, I have only ever taken one class that might be described as partially linguistic in nature. That said, I do have an interest in this area.
There are very few sounds that occur in only one language (I’m tempted to say there aren’t any, but I have a feeling there are a couple), and given how English has developed over the centuries, I doubt it has any unique sounds.
One of my coworkers is from Nepal, and her name has a th in it that we can’t really pronounce the way she does; the last four letters are “stha” and people mangle it to “sta”…
Welsh has it - well them actually - the voiceless version is written “th” and the voiced “dd” (which is considered a distinct letter). This would suggest that the sounds were already present on the British Isles when English was developing - on the other hand there was precious little in the way of linguistic exchange between the Celts & the “Saxons”* so I don’t know if that has any bearing.
As far as “unique” sounds, I’d always assumed the Welsh “ll” sound to be unique but following Elyanna’s lead Wiki tells me it’s also found in an eclectic range of languages including Zulu, Greenlandic, Hmong, and dialects of Norwegian and Cantonese !
*I do of course realise that there were several “tribes” “groups” etc. who invaded the British Isles and whose languages contributed to English but I’m using “Saxon” as an easy catch all.
The letter sequence th in transcribed Nepalese (and other Indian languages) has nothing to do with the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds in English “thing” and “this.”
There are two sounds in Indian languages that are usually transcribed as th – /t̪ʰ/ and /ʈʰ/.
Icelandic and I think Faeroese both have both TH sounds.
Most dialects of Spanish have the voiced version, written “d” --intervocalic and terminal “d” is pronounced as though it were the th in “though.” Castilian has the unvoiced version, written “c” – though most Latin American and Iberian-periphery dialects sound the letter “c” as “s” before I and E, Castilian sound it as unvoiced th.
In a parallel, convergent evolution, Modern Greek also has both, unvoiced TH being written with a theta (in some dialects, others sounding a theta as an aspirated /t/). Nearly all dialects, however, sound delta not as /d/ but as voiced th, much as in Spanish.
These are among the most difficult sounds for English speakers to distinguish, especially since there’s also dha (voiced). The first is ‘retroflex’, meaning the tongue is curled back, and the second one is ‘dental’, meaning the tongue is up to the (upper) teeth, but it’s more subtle than one might think.
The ‘h’ in this case means that it’s aspirated (air is moved more forcefully), and there’s also ta & da with retroflex and dental forms as well. Then there’s the ‘long’ forms, giving about 8 distinct sounds all pretty close together, which is probably about as unusual linguistically as the two ‘th’ forms in English.
Also a nitpick - the language is usually referred to as Nepali.
Grimm’s Law – in which a postulated Proto-Germanic language or languages developed dental fricatives from Proto-Indo-European dental plosives – is about as far back as it can be traced.
I’m not sure what he meant either, but I have noticed that English speakers often hear [t̪] as /θ/ (and, conversely, it is said that many Indians realize the interdental fricatives of English by dental plosives). Perhaps this counts as a subtlety… (although it’s a bit unrelated to your point about what <th> means).
I have noticed that Indians tend to realize /θ/ as /t̪ʰ/ and /ð/ as /d̪/ (with no aspiration on the latter).
But my experience hasn’t been quite the same the other way around. Sometimes if an Indian tries to explain the dental sounds as th sounds then English speakers might try using the interdental fricatives, but without such coaching, it seems to me that English speakers tend to hear plain /t/ and /d/. YMMV, of course.