See post #13
Well, Tomlin’s take on it was more that the tongue was forced forward through the lips. When, for instance, “Yes” was said, it came out as “Yethpblt!”
That would be the same as poor Tweety Birds’s nemisis, Thylvester the Cat, yethpbt?
Sylvester is exactly what I thought of when I read the definition of the Lateral Ess. That big, slobbery “Thufferin, thuccotash!”
“Dental ‘s’” doesn’t, by definition, necessitate the whistling sound, it’s just a way of specifying the place of articulation. Most consonants are produced by introducing some type of turbulence at some point in the airstream as it travels from the vocal folds to the lips and out into the world. Minimally, when we describe a consonant we want to list the place and manner of articulation.
Place of articulation is what the “dental” bit is all about: it specifies the place in the vocal tract where a closure takes place. Bilabial is the most forward (a closure made with both upper and lower lips), glottal is the farthest back (made with the vocal folds), and so on. Generally, an ‘s’ sound may be either dental, alveolar, or palatal. Dental is the standard ‘s’ in French, alveolar is the standard in English, and most languages will hear the palatal ‘s’ as a different phoneme (speech sound) altogether.
Changing gears a bit, the manner of articulation refers to the characteristics of the airstream. You have stop consonants, which are characterized by a complete closure which results in a slight pressure increase in the oral cavity, the release of which creates the speech sound. (the sound from a champagne cork popping out uses the same mechanism.) ‘p’, ‘k’, and ‘t’ are all stops.
Fricatives, which is what ‘s’ is, are sounds in which a partial closure introduces turbulence to the airstream. A sibilant refers to cases where air is specifically channeled through the sharp edges of the teeth.
Oops, and I almost forgot! There probably is a specific technical term that speech pathologists use to refer to whistling, but it doesn’t lie in the manner/place system for identifying sounds. But if you want to have some fun, search for IPA on wikipedia and check out how linguists try to organize sounds. (This is a horrible thing to do in one way, because learning phonetics with a writing system tends to fool you into assuming things about speech that you’ll have to unlearn later. ^^)