TH, costumes, dogs

[davewitley]

Catlady wrote:
> 
> Geoff wrote in
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/26897 :
> 
> << An unvoiced "th" is in words such as thin, think, thick >>
> 
> Do 'think'and 'thick' have the same 'th'? It doesn't sound the 
same to
> me as I experiment -- fin, fick, but sink not fink.

To me, they are identical.

> << whereas a voiced "th" is in words like the, then, thine. >>
> 
> De and den in Brooklynese, but I can't imagine saying 'dine' 
in 'For
> Dine is de kingdom and de power and de glory"... I sadly feel that 
the
> 'Continental' mispronunciation, despite all its bad connotations, 
is
> closer to the real pronuniction, ze, zen, zine.... 
> 
> << It's similar to things such as "v" being a voiced "f". >>
> 
> Lee told me that the minimum distinctive difference is found in
> "either" versus "ether" (eeever versus eeefer). So I gather that
> whether a particular 'th' sounds more like an F/V or an S/Z or a D 
has
> nothing to do with whether it is voiced or unvoiced?

No.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Consonants

For definitions of the terms (bilabial etc) click on them.

As Karen ('the other Karen') has implied, the words 'voiced' 
and 'unvoiced' means exactly that: a voiced consonant is one in 
which you have used your vocal chords to make a noise.  I think it's 
quite easy if you pay attention to what your tongue, teeth, lips and 
throat are actually doing as you speak.

We can simplify (and approximate) the table on Wiki as follows:

Roughly speaking, we make consonants with three parts of the mouth: 
lips (labials), teeth/tongue (dental), and the palate at the back of 
the mouth (velar) - in some languages finer distinctions are 
necessary, hence all the blanks in the table.

Plosives are those sounds which can only last an instant.  If 
labial, they are p (unvoiced) and b (voiced); dental, t and d 
(ditto); velar, k and g (as in dog).

Nasals are those where you breathe out through the nose (see, this 
terminology is not so abstruse, it's common *sense*) as you make the 
noise: m, n, ng.  They are necessarily voiced.

Fricatives are where you blow air through the mouth as you make the 
same or similar motion as you would for the corresponding plosive.  
As you can see from the table, it's here that English gets 
complicated, because we put our tongues in places that we don't for 
the other sounds.  And we don't bother with the voiced velar 
fricative - a noise you should be able to make for yourself now if 
you have been following, pretty well as in 'ugh'.  So f and v almost 
correspond (not quite because we use teeth plus lips instead of lips 
alone) to p and b; s and z to t and d, and ch as in loch to k.  In 
addition we have the two forms of th, and sh and the sound 
represented by s in 'pleasure'

That leaves the two forms of l (limit, ill), and r and y (yet).

There you are.  Something we would not even bother to spend time 
discussing if our schools took a couple of hours of English lessons 
to teach it at age 12.  It's so easy that by the time you were 3 you 
didn't even know you were doing it.

David, who thinks another few hours on the phonetic alphabet would 
transform the performance of anglo-saxons at foreign languages