Comments on: Theta and Eth, your new Phonetic Phriends

By: Maree

Maree — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:31:18 +0000

I find it interesting that in English, there is no differentiation between the eth sound and the theta sound. But in other languages like Icelandic there is a symbol for both the eth (ð, as you mentioned before) and the theta (þ, which is called the thorn). It seems that English can be quite unclear when it comes to being able to read a word and know how it’s pronounced as opposed to other languages that have additional letters as well as various accents, when English has none of those things.

By: will

will — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:49:59 +0000

Look for Charis SIL and Doulos SIL, both have these characters and both are free

By: Lois Larson

Lois Larson — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:36:22 +0000

I am searching for a font that contains these characters (not a gif file). I am working on a submission in Old English for oneof our professors and I cannot locate some of these fonts. Do you have a source for the fonts that you can point me to?

By: Alexandra Quesada Rojas

Alexandra Quesada Rojas — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:36:53 +0000

Hello
I am a costa rican woman who is learning phonetics.
I’m very glad I found this source, it’s very helpful when you are starting to learn phonetics.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:31:09 +0000

Actually, I suspect that some young children are subconsciously aware of the difference between “theta” and “eth” before they can pronounce either one. The two “TH” sounds were probably the last English sounds that I learned to pronounce, which is why I can remember not being able to pronounce them.

Until I was about 5 years old, if I was asked to repeat the sentence “Throw them the soap, and then they can take a bath,” I would have pronounced it something like “Frow dem da soap, and den dey can take a baff.” In other words, I pronounced theta like “f” and eth like “d”. So the two “th”‘s were clearly different sounds to me, even though I couldn’t pronounce either one of them at the time.

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The glottal stop: your new Phonetic Phriend : Notes from a Linguistic Mystic — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:00:49 +0000

[...] of two pieces of tissue that move together and apart during speech, and vibrate rapidly to create voicing. Those pieces of tissue can be moved a great deal, and even brought all the way [...]

By: Ig-pay atin-lay: evealer-ray of onology-phay : Notes from a Linguistic Mystic

Ig-pay atin-lay: evealer-ray of onology-phay : Notes from a Linguistic Mystic — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 03:49:15 +0000

[...] just moved to the back of the word. So, I’d expect it to be “anks-thay”, with a θ (the sound in “thistle”). This got me to thinking, why would this [...]