Talk:Th-stopping

One man's dialect variation is another's speech impediment
Th-stopping may be acceptable in some dialects but it is certainly considered a speech impediment in others. I assume anyone would allow that lisping is a speech impediment in English, even though it's correct in Castillian!

I can't speak for all dialects (no one can) but I can say that it is considered an impediment in Australia. There, th-stopping (and, more commonly, th-fronting) is corrected by speech pathologists (N.B. not elocution teachers). My guess is that the situation would be the same in Britain. There's no reason why this page can't be in more than one category. Nick (talk) 16:10, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Th-stopping is not like lisping. Lisping is not correct in Spanish anyway since there is a separate s phoneme as well the th of c and z. If one had a Spaniard who had extreme difficulty pronouncing s's at all then that person would then have lisping. Someone who pronounces their th's as t's d's is not doing it because they can't say th's; they are doing it because that's their dialect. granted, there may be some people who just can't speak RP but you can't say that of every1 that does th-stopping.

Besides, the fact that it may be treated as such is not necessarily an indication that it is. Heard of the times when homosexuality was considered a mental illness?

As far as I know, th-stopping is treated as Irishness and it's just a case of, if you here someone use it, they're probalby Irish or else from South Africa or something. Munci (talk) 20:39, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Topic confusion (/t/-/θ/ merger vs. non-merger dialects) (English only vs. general linguistic process with multi-language examples)
This article seems to intend to cover both th-stopping that results in a /t/-/θ/ merger and th-stopping that doesn't result in a such a merger. The introduction/header reflects this in that it discusses both merged and unmerged dialects. However, most of rest of the article adresses specifically only cases in which the merger occurs, and the information in the header about which dialects have and don't have mergers in never expanded upon. The examples given for non-merger accents are never referenced again later in the article.

The title of the article seems to refer to the process of [θ] and [ð] stopping/becoming stops in general as a sound change or alternation in linguistics. This seems to me to be reflected in that the introduction mentions the occurrence of a shift from [ð] to [d] in German and other continental Germanic languages. However, in reality, this article only covers variations of the phonetic realisation of the phonemes [θ] and [ð] as stops in various dialects of English. (I suppose it is possible that the use of the digraph in the title rather than an IPA character or the name of the sound is intended to suggest a scope limited to English or English-related examples.)

The article later links to a wiktionary appendix for English homophonous pairs when there is a /t/-/θ/ merger, yet also has a whole section listing English homophones resulting of the merger, and the list here is longer and more detailed than the appendix list. Perhaps the list here should be moved to that appendix (wikt:appendix:English_dialect-dependent_homophones) or perhaps to the Pronunciation_of_English_⟨th⟩ article.

In general, the majority of the information in this article seems to be better suited to an article titled Thin-tin merger (English), and overlaps heavily with Pronunciation_of_English_⟨th⟩ as well as the various articles in category:Splits_and_mergers_in_English_phonology.

This leaves a gap in information about non-merger θ- and ð-plosivisation in English dialects as well as θ- and ð-plosivisation in general as a diachronic linguistics sound change. This may be a gap we want to fill by adding more information to this page and moving some of the information here out to the other related pages that I linked to. Alternatively, we could just re-title this article and lightly modify it, but I still find that unpreferrable as this article far too heavily overlaps with the scopes of the related articles.

I think the best way to fix this would be to move the homphonous pairs list, move the information that's specifically related to the merger or its occurrence to one of the many pages related to sound mergers in English, and add more information about non-merger dialects in order to leave this page as a general overview of both merger and and non-merger plosivisation of in English. There could perhaps also be a section on the related plosivisation of in continental Germanic languages that results in certain alternations or correspondances with English in the distribution of alveolar phones in those languages. Perhaps, if there be sufficient demand, there could be a separate article on plosivisation in general, but I doubt such demand exists, as (I believe) it is very rare for sounds to plosivise for its own sake rather than as a form of assimilation and dissimilation ([θ] and [ð] are one of the rare few sounds which tend to do that regularly). Thoughts? 74.96.192.195 (talk) 00:16, 9 September 2021 (UTC)


 * I feel like for simplicity we just leave the name as is, especially since that's what actually academic literature uses. I don't think we should make up any old name we want. The article as it stands is already pretty short, so no real need for a split. Wolfdog (talk) 13:28, 10 April 2024 (UTC)