Voiceless alveolar fricative

In Romance languages, it occurs as the normal voiceless alveolar sibilant in Astur-Leonese, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician, northern European Portuguese, and some Occitan dialects. It also occurs in Basque and Mirandese, where it is opposed to a different voiceless alveolar sibilant, the more common [s]; the same distinction occurs in a few dialects of northeastern Portuguese. Outside this area, it also occurs in a few dialects of Latin American Spanish (e.g. Antioqueño, in Colombia).

Amongst Germanic languages, it occurs in Dutch (and closely related Low German), Icelandic, many dialects in Scandinavia, and working-class Glaswegian English.

It also occurs in Modern Greek (with a laminal articulation), as well as the Baltic languages.

There is no single IPA symbol used for this sound. The symbol ⟨s̺⟩ is often used, with a diacritic indicating an apical pronunciation. However, that is potentially problematic in that not all alveolar retracted sibilants are apical (see below), and not all apical alveolar sibilants are retracted. The ad hoc non-IPA symbols ⟨ṣ⟩ and ⟨S⟩ are often used in the linguistic literature even when IPA symbols are used for other sounds, but ⟨ṣ⟩ is a common transcription of the retroflex sibilant [ʂ].

In medieval times, it occurred in a wider area, including the Romance languages spoken in most or all of France and Iberia (Old Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Catalan, French, etc.), as well as in the Old and Middle High German of central and southern Germany,[4] and most likely Northern Germany as well. In all of these languages, the retracted "apico-alveolar" sibilant was opposed to a non-retracted sibilant much like modern English [s], and in many of them, both voiceless and voiced versions of both sounds occurred. A solid evidence is different spellings used for two different sibilants: in general, the retracted "apico-alveolar" variants were written ⟨s⟩ or ⟨ss⟩, while the non-retracted variants were written ⟨z⟩, ⟨c⟩ or ⟨ç⟩. In the Romance languages, the retracted sibilants derived from Latin /s/, /ss/ or /ns/, while the non-retracted sibilants derived from earlier affricates [t͡s] and [d͡z], which in turn derived from palatalized /k/ or /t/. The situation was similar in High German, where the retracted sibilants derived largely from Proto-Germanic /s/, while the non-retracted sibilants derived from instances of Proto-Germanic /t/ that were shifted by the High German sound shift. Minimal pairs were common in all languages. Examples in Middle High German, for example, were wizzen "to know" (Old English witan, cf. "to wit") vs. wissen "known" (Old English wissen), and weiz "white" (Old English wīt) vs. weis "way" (Old English wīs, cf. "-wise").

Often, to speakers of languages or dialects that do not have the sound, it is said to have a "whistling" quality, and to sound similar to palato-alveolar ʃ. For this reason, when borrowed into such languages or represented with non-Latin characters, it is often replaced with [ʃ]. This occurred, for example, in English borrowings from Old French (e.g. push from pousser, cash from caisse); in Polish borrowings from medieval German (e.g. kosztować from kosten, żur from sūr (contemporary sauer)); and in representations of Mozarabic (an extinct medieval Romance language once spoken in southern Spain) in Arabic characters. The similarity between retracted [s̺] and [ʃ] has resulted in many exchanges in Spanish between the sounds, during the medieval period when Spanish had both phonemes. Examples are jabón (formerly xabón) "soap" from Latin sapō/sapōnem, jibia "cuttlefish" (formerly xibia) from Latin sēpia, and tijeras "scissors" (earlier tixeras < medieval tiseras) from Latin cīsōrias (with initial t- due to influence from tōnsor "shaver").

One of the clearest descriptions of this sound is from Obaid:[5] "There is a Castilian s, which is a voiceless, concave, apicoalveolar fricative: The tip of the tongue turned upward forms a narrow opening against the alveoli of the upper incisors. It resembles a faint /ʃ/ and is found throughout much of the northern half of Spain".

Many dialects of Modern Greek have a very similar-sounding sibilant that is pronounced with a laminal articulation.[4]

This distinction has since vanished from most of the languages that once had it in medieval times.

• In most dialects of Spanish, the four alveolar sibilants have merged into the non-retracted [s].
• In French and most dialects of Portuguese, the four alveolar sibilants have merged into non-retracted [s] and [z], while in European Portuguese, most other Old World Portuguese variants and some recently European-influenced dialects of Brazil all instances of coda [s̺], voiced [z̺] before voiced consonants, were backed to [ɕ] [ʑ], while in most of Brazilian Portuguese this phenomenon is much rarer, being essentially absent in the dialects that conserved the most archaic Portuguese forms and/or had a greater indigenous and/or non-Portuguese European influence.
• In the remaining dialects of Portuguese, found in northern Portugal, they merged into the retracted [s̺] [z̺], or, as in Mirandese (which is, however, not a Portuguese dialect, but belongs to Asturian-Leonese), conserved the medieval distinction.
• In central and northern Spanish, the non-retracted [s] was fronted to [θ] after merging with non-retracted [z], while the retracted [s̺] remains.
• In German, most instances of [s̺] were fronted to [s], but some were backed to become [ʃ] (initially before a consonant; in many modern High German dialects, also non-initially before a consonant), postalveolar as in European and fluminense Portuguese.

Those languages in which the sound occurs typically did not have a phonological process from which either [s] or [ʃ] appeared, two similar sounds with which ⟨s̺⟩ was eventually confused. In general, older European languages only had a single pronunciation of s.

In Romance languages, [s] was reached from -ti-, -ci-, -ce- ([ti], [ki], [ke]) clusters that eventually became [ts], [tsi], [tse] and later [s], [si], [se] (as in Latin fortia "force", civitas "city", centum "hundred"), while [ʃ] was reached:

• From a [sk] or [ks] cluster in southern Romance, as in Latin miscere > Portuguese mexer "to move", Latin fluxus > Spanish flojo "lax", Latin crescere > Italian crescere "grow", with a different pronunciation.
• from a deaffricated [tʃ] in Northern France and southern-central Portugal, as in French chat "cat", Portuguese achar "find".

In High German, [s] was reached from a [t] > [ts] > [s] process, as in German Wasser vs English water. In English, the same process of Romance [ts] > [s] occurred in Norman-imported words, accounting for modern homophones sell and cell. [ʃ] was also reached from a -sk- cluster reduction as in Romance, e.g. Old English spelling "asc" for modern "ash", German schirm vs English screen, English ship vs Danish skib.

Standard Modern Greek, which has apical [s̺], lacked both processes.

The Germanic-speaking regions that did not have either phenomena have normally preserved the apical [s̺], that is, Icelandic, Dutch and many Scandinavian lects. It also reached modern times in Low German, but this language has largely been replaced by Standard German.

The main Romance language to preserve the sound, Castilian Spanish, is exceptional in that it had both events that produced [s] and [ʃ], and preserved the apical S at the expense of both, that were shifted farther away. Galician changed only [s], and Catalan, as well as Ladino, still preserves all three sounds.

Because of the widespread medieval distribution, it has been speculated that retracted [s̺] was the normal pronunciation in spoken Latin. Certain borrowings suggest that it was not far off from the sh-sound [ʃ], e.g. Aramaic Jeshua > Greek Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs) > Latin Jesus, Hebrew Shabbat > Vulgar Latin Sabato; but this could also be explained by the lack of a better sound in Latin to represent Semitic sh. It equally well could have been an areal feature inherited from the prehistoric languages of Western Europe, as evidenced by its occurrence in modern Basque.

For the same reasons, it can be speculated that retracted [s̺] was the pronunciation of Proto-Germanic s. Its presence in many branches of Indo-European and its presence particularly in the more conservative languages inside each branch (e.g. Icelandic, Spanish), as well as being found in disparate areas, such as the Baltic languages and Greece, suggests it could have ultimately been the main allophone of Proto-Indo-European s, known for ranging from [s] to as far as [ɕ].

[ʃ], but not [s], was developed in Italian. However, where Spanish and Catalan have apical [s̺], Italian uses the same laminal [s] that occurs in standard forms of English: evidence, it could be argued, that S was not pronounced apically in Latin. But Neapolitan has a medieval S becoming either [s] or [ʃ] depending on context, much as in European Portuguese, which could attest to the previous existence of [s̺] in the Italian Peninsula. The Italian pronunciation as laminal S could also be explained by the presence of [ʃ] but not [s], thus moving the pronunciation of [s̺] to the front of the mouth in an attempt to better differentiate between the two sounds.

• Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence. However, it does not have the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant.

• Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.

• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.

• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.

• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.

• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.