Talk:Sibilant consonant
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Could someone please clarify the relationship between this and fricative? -- SS 03:02, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- A sibilant is a type of fricative that has a high "second formant" spike on its waveform. Basically, what it means is that there's a distinct "whistling" sound that can be heard in a sibilant. But sibilants are just a subset of fricatives that have unusual phonetic properties. thefamouseccles 03:12, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
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- In articulation, a sibilant has a narrow channel in the tongue that other fricatives lack. You can have a non-sibilant alveolar fricative, for instance; this is transcribed as a raised approximant (a turned 'r' with a "tack" under it). kwami 10:36, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)
The sibilant/non-sibilant distinction is especially important in English. Most people consciously know that to pluralize a regular English noun, they simply add an -s to it. But what they know only subconciously is that English plurals can take three forms (allomorphs), those being [s], [z], and [əz]. [s] occurs after most voiceless sounds, and [z] occurs after most voiced sounds. The sequence [əz] fills in the rest, and occurs after sibilants, i.e. [s, z, ʃ, ʒ]. Thus, distinguishing between sibilants and non-sibilants is extremely important in English.
I removed this, because this phenomenon is merely a process of inserting an epenthetic schwa to avoid two consecutive instances of the same consonant. The same thing happens when one adds the past tense suffix -ed to a word: when the last letter is not t or d, we can just tack the suffix on: ease ([i:z]) + -ed produces phonetic [i:zd], but if we try it with raid ([rejd]), then we say [rejdəd] and not [rejd:]. It has nothing to do with sibilants. thefamouseccles 03:17, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] English plural sibilant distinction
Just to be clear, English nouns ending in a sibilant take the plural allomorph [ez]. thefamouseccles, you are exactly correct in your assesment of the english past tense, that verbs ending in t and d take the past tense [ed]. However, the plural situation is different, because a word like JUDGE which ends in an affricate -- which can be a sibilant because it shares qualities of fricatives -- still gets the [ez] plural allomorph. Even if you just wanted to look at the fricative part, you end up with just the [ʒ] sound (like in 'genre'), which is hardly found in English at all. So, it isn't about avoiding two consecutive instances of the same consonant, though that is what the past tense is.
peace.
- I'm taking this back out. Thefamouseccles is correct: the epenthetic schwa breaks up sequences of similar consonants. What's going on with the sibilants is no different from what's going on with the past tense: the schwa comes between sequences of coronals, whether fricatives or stops. This demonstrates the unity of the articulatory category "coronal", but not "sibilant". kwami 10:27, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)
[edit] Grooved fricative
Are "sibilant" and "grooved fricative" synonymous? --Ptcamn 07:59, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
- I believe they are. kwami 07:16, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
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- I think so too. The sibilant term is focusing on an acoustic classification while the grooved term is focusing on an articulatory classification. However, we dont know as much about the articulation of the midline of the tongue for many languages simply because we dont have data collected on tongue shapes (it is time consuming to collect shapes compared to just recording the sounds). So, we dont really have a definite answer at this time, as far as I can tell. Incidentally, in American English, some vowels have grooves in the midline of the tongue — these vowels clearly are not sibilant. So, although a groove may be a necessary condition for creating a sibilant sound, there are grooves that are not used for sibilants. – ishwar (speak) 00:20, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
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- See speech.umaryland.edu/Publications/issp.pdf for some cool tongue shapes of English [æ]. – ishwar (speak) 00:22, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Request
Just so you guys know, this page has almost nothing to explain to a layman the meaning of the word "Sibilant". You're discussing the subject as though anyone coming to the page will have some education on phonetics and languages in general, and you are totally ignoring any laymen who stumble in here just looking for a simple description of which sounds would be classified as sibilant. (i.e. me)
Maybe one of you who knows more about the subject could include a section at the beginning (where you describe the process of making the sounds) giving a few examples in plain english? I know that would have helped me immensely. - Toad, 12 April, 2007, 10:51 AM EDT.
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- I'd have to agree. This article is pretty much useless to an average layman. 75.100.154.106 (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 21:18, 25 January 2009 (UTC).
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- Absolutely agreed. This article is absurd for non-linguists. The spirit of Wikipedia is to be informative to all - and this article is not. Indeed, this seems to be a common theme on the transliteration and phonetic-related wiki pages. In the References section, I shall add a link to an International Phonetic Alphabet Chart with pronunciation sound files. This ought to help non linguists surmount what might be construed as hopeless ivory tower linguistobabble. 152.3.183.94 (talk) 17:10, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
[edit] References
The authors of this page have been good at including references in the writing, but there is no reference list at the base of the article giving the full details of the references. Please could someone who knows the full references insert these at the bottom of the article, thanks,(George-E (talk) 19:42, 2 March 2008 (UTC)).
[edit] "Thibilant"
- The spin-off terms shibilant, and rarely thibilant, are used to describe particular kinds of sibilant.
I don't believe interdental fricatives are considered sibilants. If I'm correct, the reference to "thibilants" as kinds of sibilants is erroneous and should be removed or amended.--Atkinson (talk) 08:12, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
