ALL About Dental Fricative Replacement (It's Interesting I Swear)
There's a lot of very common words in English that most of the world struggles to grasp, even those learning the language as children. Even in that last sentence, I used them 4 separate times. These are the wonderful, and very infamous, dental fricatives. Most people - who are a lot less into this than I am - know them simply as the 'th' sound. This, that, these, those, think, thought, thanks, father, myth, etc. Dental fricatives are everywhere in the English language, but are pretty rare everywhere else! A quick google search will bring you to an article by Researchgate, stating that "they are rare in the world's languages, occurring in 43 (7.6%) out of 566 UPSID languages". Wikipedia will tell you that only English, Greek, Swahili, and various dialects of Arabic, Spanish, and the northern Berber languages contain the phonemes. Because the 'th' sound (which I will be referring to as the dental fricatives for the remainder of the post) is so incre...