Voiced alveolar and dental plosives (or stops) are a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is ⟨d⟩ (although the symbol ⟨d̪⟩ can be used to distinguish the dental plosive, and ⟨d̠⟩ the postalveolar).
There are only a few languages that distinguish dental and alveolar stops, among them Kota, Toda, Venda and some Irish dialects.
In phonology, an allophone (/ˈæləfoʊn/ ; from the Greek ἄλλος, állos 'other' and φωνή, phōnē 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive [t] (as in stop [ˈstɒp]) and the aspirated form [tʰ] (as in top [ˈtʰɒp]) are allophones for the phoneme /t/, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, [d] (as in dolor [doˈloɾ]) and [ð] (as in nada [ˈnaða]) are allophones for the phoneme /d/, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English (as in the difference between dare and there).
The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible.
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade ([t], [d]), tongue body ([k], [ɡ]), lips ([p], [b]), or glottis ([ʔ]). Plosives contrast with nasals, where the vocal tract is blocked but airflow continues through the nose, as in /m/ and /n/, and with fricatives, where partial occlusion impedes but does not block airflow in the vocal tract.
Dalet (dāleth, also spelled Daleth or Daled) is the fourth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician dālt 𐤃, Hebrew dālet ד, Aramaic dālaṯ 𐡃, Syriac dālaṯ ܕ, and Arabic dāl د (in abjadi order; 8th in modern order). Its sound value is the voiced alveolar plosive ([d]). It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪕, South Arabian 𐩵, and Ge'ez ደ.
The letter is based on a glyph of the Proto-Sinaitic script, probably called dalt 'door' (door in Modern Hebrew is delet), ultimately based on a hieroglyph depicting a door:
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin lēnis 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called debuccalization, which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like [h] or [ʔ]), or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely.
An example of synchronic lenition is found in most varieties of American English, in the form of tapping: the /t/ of a word like wait [weɪt] is pronounced as the more sonorous [ɾ] in the related form waiting [ˈweɪɾɪŋ]. Some varieties of Spanish show debuccalization of /s/ to [h] at the end of a syllable, so that a word like estamos "we are" is pronounced [ehˈtamoh]. An example of diachronic lenition can be found in the Romance languages, where the /t/ of Latin patrem ("father", accusative) has become /d/ in Italian (an irregular change; compare saeta "silk" > seta) and Spanish padre (the latter weakened synchronically /d/ → [ð̞]), while in Catalan pare, French père and Portuguese pai historical /t/ has disappeared completely.