Re: TH
- From: holman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Eugene Holman)
- Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 00:59:37 +0300
In article <%luHe.55172$dN6.47704@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Ivan
Danicic" <ivand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello gurus, I'd like to get a list of world languages which use the
> (English) TH sound, voiced and/or unvoiced. So far I only know of English,
> Spanish (Castillian), Greek, Icelandic. Any info will be gratefully
> received.
Albanian, Danish, and Sámi have the voiced variant. Some traditional
Finnish regional dialects have one or the other sound in the equivalent of
words like standard Finnish metsä,'forest' [dialectal me[th][th]ä] and
padan 'pot GENITIVE' [dialectal pa[dh]an]. L. F. Brosnahan, 1961, *The
Sounds of Language: An Inquiry into the role of genetic factors in the
development of sound systems*. Cambridge, although otherwise off the wall,
contains maps of the present and known earlier distribution of the two
sounds in Europe. The sounds were quite frequent in the older Germanic
languages, having developed from PIE *dh and *t. According to Brosnahan,
they were retained in the marginal and insular languages of Europe, such
as Icelandic, English, Sámi, Greek, and Albanian, but lost in the more
nuclear languages, such as Dutch and German. The occurrence of [dh] in
Danish is a result of relatively recent sound changes, cf. Danish gade
'street' with [dh], but Norwegian gate, Swedish gata, both with [t].
The Wisigothic of Wulfila also had the voiceless dental fricative.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
.
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