Voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives
A voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is. The symbol is called "belted l" and is distinct from "l with tilde",, which transcribes a different soundthe velarized alveolar lateral approximant, often called "dark L".
A voiceless alveolar lateral approximant is transcribed in IPA as. In Sino-Tibetan languages,
argue that Burmese and Standard Tibetan have voiceless lateral approximants and Li Fang-Kuei & William Baxter contrast apophonically the voiceless alveolar lateral approximant from its voiced counterpart in the reconstruction of Old Chinese. A voiceless dental or alveolar lateral approximant is found as an allophone of its voiced counterpart in British English and Philadelphia English after voiceless coronal and labial stops, and it is velarized before back vowels; the allophone of after is most commonly as a voiceless velar lateral approximant. See English phonology.
Features
Features of a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative:Occurrence
Lateral fricatives are common among indigenous languages of western North America, such as Nahuatl, Tlingit and Navajo, and in North Caucasian languages, such as Avar. It is also found in African languages, such as Zulu, and Asian languages, such as Chukchi, some Yue dialects like Taishanese, the Hlai languages of Hainan, and several Formosan languages and dialects in Taiwan.Lateral fricatives are rare in European languages outside the Caucasus, but it is found notably in Welsh, in which it is written. Several Welsh names beginning with this sound have been borrowed into English and then retain the Welsh spelling but are pronounced with an , or they are substituted with . It was also found in certain dialects of Lithuanian Yiddish.
Modern South Arabian languages are known for their apparent archaic Semitic features, especially in their system of phonology. For example, they preserve the lateral fricatives and / of Proto-Semitic. Except for the Modern South Arabian languages, every other extant Semitic language has merged Proto-Semitic *s2 into one of the two other plain sibilants.
The phoneme was reconstructed for the most ancient Hebrew speech of the Ancient Israelites. The orthography of Biblical Hebrew, however, did not directly indicate it. It is, however, attested by later developments: was written with, but the letter was also used for the sound. Later, merged with, a sound that had been written only with. As a result, three etymologically distinct modern Hebrew phonemes can be distinguished: written, written , and evolving from and written . The specific pronunciation of evolving to from is known based on comparative evidence since is the corresponding Proto-Semitic phoneme and is still attested in Modern South Arabian languages, and early borrowings indicate it from Ancient Hebrew. The phoneme began to merge with in Late Biblical Hebrew, as is indicated by interchange of orthographic and, possibly under the influence of Aramaic, and became the rule in Mishnaic Hebrew. In all Jewish reading traditions, and have merged completely, but in Samaritan Hebrew has instead merged into.
A sound is also found in two of the constructed languages invented by J. R. R. Tolkien, Sindarin and Quenya. In Sindarin, it is written as initially and medially and finally, and in Quenya, it appears only initially and is written.
Dental or denti-alveolar
Alveolar
Alveolar approximant
Velarized dental or alveolar approximant
Semitic languages
The sound is conjectured as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic language, usually transcribed as ; it has evolved into Arabic, Hebrew :Among Semitic languages, the sound still exists in contemporary Modern South Arabian languages; Soqotri, Shehri, and Mehri. In Ge'ez, it is written with the letter Śawt.