Voiceless dental and alveolar trills

Voiceless dental and alveolar trills are a type of consonantal sound. They differ from their cognate only by the vibrations of the vocal cord. It occurs in a few languages, usually alongside the voiced version, as a similar phoneme or an allophone.

Proto-Indo-European developed into a sound written as , with the letter for and the diacritic for , in Ancient Greek. It was probably a voiceless alveolar trill and became the regular word-initial allophone of in standard Attic Greek that has disappeared in Modern Greek.

Features

Features of a voiceless alveolar trill:

• Its place of articulation is dental, alveolar or post-alveolar, which means it is articulated behind upper front teeth, at the alveolar ridge or behind the alveolar ridge. It is most often apical, which means that it is pronounced with the tip of the tongue.

Occurrence

Dental

Alveolar

Voiceless alveolar fricative trill

A voiceless alveolar fricative trill is not known to occur as a phoneme in any language, except possibly the East Sakhalin dialect of Nivkh. It occurs allophonically in Czech.

Features

Features of a voiceless alveolar fricative trill:

• Its place of articulation is laminal alveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge.

Occurrence

See also

• Index of phonetics articles

Notes

References

External links