# "th" becoming "f"



## ceint

It's very common in British lower-class urban accents (especially Cockney) for the unvoiced "th" in words like "thanks" to be pronounced as "f", i.e. "fanks". Something similar happens with the voiced "th" of words like "they", which becomes "v", i.e. "vey" (although "dey" is also quite common).

Does anything similar happen in other languages that have the "th" sound? The only other language I know which uses that sound (the unvoiced "th") is Spanish (peninsular version) and it definitely doesn't happen in that language. In fact, the Spanish people I asked seemed bemused by the fact that "f" could be substituted for "th" ("ferveza" sounded funny to them), but for me as an English person they sound almost the same. 

Do "f"/"th" unvoiced and "v"/"th" voiced sound similar enough to be easily confused to you?

Thanks.


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## yodired

But you mean in English or in Spanish?


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## ceint

In any language which those sounds exist.


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## yodired

It is not common to confuse those sounds in Spanish. _Cerveza _does not sound like _ferveza_ ever.

The confusion comes in Balón, Vaso, where v and b and pronounced the same, so we have to learn what words are written with b or v in school and sometimes, people make mistakes. The same happens with the letters c, z and s, which sound the same in Venezuela and most Latin-America so, we have to be taught what words are written with b, v, c, z, s and h.


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## kifaru

In African American English the h to f transition occurs in words that end in th such as with.


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## sokol

ceint said:


> Do "f"/"th" unvoiced and "v"/"th" voiced sound similar enough to be easily confused to you?



According to auditive linguistics they _are _similar, especially /f/ and /th/ (less so /v/ and /th/).
But auditive similarity does not mean that a sound shift will happen, only that a sound shift is _not unlikely_ (and not a yota more!).

In the case of African American English the transition from /th/ to /f/ may go back to this auditive similarity (that I do not know, but it is entirely possible) while in the case of English dialects I would suspect that this were just an old feature of the dialects of the region concerned.
(It could well be that in medieval time the auditive similarity did play a role in the sound change.)


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## sethmachine

While I do not know anything about British dialects of English, where I live in North East US, we do not even use the phoneme 'th' as in thing, instead th is replaced by f in speech.


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## sokol

sethmachine said:


> While I do not know anything about British dialects of English, where I live in North East US, we do not even use the phoneme 'th' as in thing, instead th is replaced by f in speech.



In the case of New England (North East of US, right?) I would guess that it were possible for this feature being linked to British dialects. But again this is only an 'educated guess'.


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## jmx

There was a famous TV host in Spain, the late Matías Prats (senior), who claimed that, as he was from Córdoba in southern Spain and coudn't produce the [θ] sound, at the beginning of his career he pronounced [f] instead, and nobody noticed.

Apart from that, I've never heard of any confusion between those 2 sounds in Spanish.


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## huhmzah

Wow - that's really interesting. I know that in the Tunisian dialect of Arabic the equivalent of "there is/are..." is officially: "thamma" (ثمة) /θəmːa/ which is a direct borrowing from a rarely used Classical/Standard Arabic term with roughly the same meaning -- but fairly often Tunisians pronounce and even write "thamma" as "famma".


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## yodired

Well, I do not know much about dialetcs, but I think I got Ceint's point.

In Spain, cerveza y pronounced *thervetha *with the "th" sounding like the "th" for *with.* But it does not mean there's a confussion between the two sounds, since in Spanish the letter that has the most similar sound to "th" in "with" is the letter z, which is pronounced like that in Spain but not in Latin-america.

Well, excuse me if I lost the whole point and said something not related to the topic.


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## ernest_

ceint said:


> Do "f"/"th" unvoiced and "v"/"th" voiced sound similar enough to be easily confused to you?



Yes, it happened to me a couple of times over the telephone that I misheard /θ/ for /f/ or the other way around. But that weren't common words, but names or acronyms that I hadn't heard before. This was the first time in my life I realised how similar these two sounds are. The voiced variants are both allophones in Catalan, and Spanish doesn't have "v" I think, so these are harder to confuse.


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## Forero

Many Old Spanish _f-_ words are _h-_ words in Modern Spanish, and I have even heard "jue" (with an _h_-like first sound) for Spanish _fue_.  Thus Spanish /f/ tends to be more like /h/ than like /θ/, and Spanish /θ/ may become /s/ but not /f/.
English /θ/ may become /t/ or /f/ but not /s/, and /s/ for the English morphemes _-s_, _-'s_, and _-s'_ can immediately follow a /θ/, /f/, or /t/ but not an /s/ or _sh_ sound.
I think Greek sometimes changes /θ/ to /t/ but not to /f/.  Latin words cognate to (not borrowed from) Greek words with /θ/ have /f/ or /d/ instead.
The original Cyrillic alphabet had a separate letter for /θ/, but it has been abolished in Russian because all the words that formerly had /θ/ now have /f/ and the letters are similar looking.


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## Alijsh

I'm not sure if it is related to the topic but old Persian *th* (/θ/) become /h/ in Middle Persian (and consequently, in New Persian). For example, *Mithra* became *Mihr*, *rātha* (road, way) became *rāh* and so on.


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## Forero

English-speaking children tend to confuse /θ/ with /f/ (but not with /s/ or /t/) before they learn all the tiny distinctions we make between sounds.

I have read that Irish (Gaelic) _th_ is now /h/.  Did it used to be /θ/?


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## berndf

Forero said:


> Latin words cognate to (not borrowed from) Greek words with /?/ have /f/ or /d/ instead.



How could this be? Ancient Greek didn't have /?/, did it?

PS: My browser keeps replacing <theta> with "?". Sorry for that.


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## Banbha

Forero said:


> English-speaking children tend to confuse /θ/ with /f/ (but not with /s/ or /t/) before they learn all the tiny distinctions we make between sounds.
> 
> I have read that Irish (Gaelic) _th_ is now /h/. Did it used to be /θ/?


 
Hey

You're right, in Irish (Gaelic) th is always just a soft h sound like the h in the English word 'heart'. I dont think we ever had the th sound in Irish. Interestigly enough, when the Irish started speaking English as well, as we did not have the proper th sound we just say a hard t or d. To this day we still never say th (/θ/) eg thing and think are said with a 't' like ting and tink while this,that,these and those are always pronounced with a hard d hence dis,dat,dese,dose . Supposedly it's one of the ways to recognise an Irish accent if the person never says /θ/ .


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## modus.irrealis

berndf said:


> How could this be? Ancient Greek didn't have /θ/, did it?


Depends how ancient is ancient  . The Attic/Koine Greek pattern seems to be PIE /dʰ/ > Anc. Greek /tʰ/ > /θ/, but there doesn't seem to be conclusive evidence to pinpoint when this change occurred. Also, in Laconian Greek for example there are example like σιός for θεός and it's possible that that represents /s/, but it may be an attempt to represent /θ/.



Forero said:


> I think Greek sometimes changes /θ/ to /t/ but not to /f/.  Latin words cognate to (not borrowed from) Greek words with /θ/ have /f/ or /d/ instead.


Yes in certain combinations /θ/ became /t/ in Greek (after σ, χ, φ, and maybe elsewhere) although with the influence of Ancient Greek on the Modern version you can still find lots of examples of those combinations.

I think for Latin the examples with /d/ probably go back to PIE /dʰ/ and never were /θ/.

It's still interesting that apart from English, the only other changes of /θ/ > /f/ I've come across are conjectured (like Latin) or are the result of borrowing as with Russian (I believe that Russian never had /θ/, just the letter was used). I remember one of the first surprising things I learned when reading about phonetics was just how acoustically similar /θ/ and /f/ are, so it's a little strange that the change seems very rare.


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## CyrusSH

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/فریدون#Persian *Frēdōn* from Proto-Iranian **Θraitauna*.


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## PersoLatin

Hi Cyrus, in the link you sent (wiktionary), have you noticed, the Avestan for Frēdōn, is written from left to right, shouldn't be from right to left?


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## Delvo

sokol said:


> In the case of New England (North East of US, right?) I would guess that it were possible for this feature being linked to British dialects. But again this is only an 'educated guess'.


I think not. For one thing, that other person must have meant southeast, where this actually is common, not northeast, from which I have never encountered it at all. The southeast is where the black and Irish portions of the population are highest; Bantu languages and Irish Gælic lack /θ/ and /ð/. To inherit the /θ→f/ conversion from London, an American regional population would need to be descended largely from immigrants from London, which isn't the case for any part of the USA that I know of. Compared to the Southeast, the Northeast may be more English and less Irish, but those immigrants were primarily rural before coming here, and the Northeast also has more from other European countries, especially central & northern. And the effect on pronunciation of /θ/ and /ð/ is as would be expected from that: northeastern American accents that don't do the standard English /θ/ and /ð/ match the European tendency for replacing them not with bilabials (f,v) but with alveolars (t,d,s,z).



Forero said:


> I think Greek sometimes changes /θ/ to /t/ but not to /f/.  Latin words cognate to (not borrowed from) Greek words with /θ/ have /f/ or /d/ instead.





berndf said:


> How could this be? Ancient Greek didn't have {θ}, did it?





modus.irrealis said:


> The Attic/Koine Greek pattern seems to be PIE /dʰ/ > Anc. Greek /tʰ/ > /θ/... I think for Latin the examples with /d/ probably go back to PIE /dʰ/ and never were /θ/.


What about any that ended up as /f/ in Latin? I don't know of examples, or how they would have happened if there are any.



modus.irrealis said:


> It's still interesting that apart from English, the only other changes of /θ/ > /f/ I've come across are conjectured (like Latin) or are the result of borrowing as with Russian (I believe that Russian never had /θ/, just the letter was used). I remember one of the first surprising things I learned when reading about phonetics was just how acoustically similar /θ/ and /f/ are, so it's a little strange that the change seems very rare.


For evolution within a single language, there usually needs to be a similarity not only to the listener's ears, but also to the speaker's mouth.

The languages that originally used the Phoenician alphabet had no /θ/, but some would evolve it later, and they always adopted a derivative of the letter for /t/ or /tˤ/ to represent it. The Greeks adopted the letter for /tˤ/ in the form of [Θ] for use for their sound /tʰ/, which later became the fricative /θ/, and that letter was adopted into runes as [ᚦ], which represented /θ/. The Phoenician & Aramaic letter for plain /t/ would end up also representing /θ/ in various languages including Syriac (ܬ), Hebrew (ת, which also ends up as /s/ in some Jewish populations), and Arabic (split into ت for /t/ and ث for /θ/). In Arabic, the same thing would also happen with its voiced counterpart (د for /d/, ذ for /ð/) and pharyngealized counterpart (ط for /tˤ/, ظ for /θˤ/). So there is clearly more of a tendency to associate dentals with alveolars than with labiodentals.

Similarly, the Phoenician alphabet had no letter for /f/ or /v/, and languages using it didn't originally have those sounds either, but some later developed them from sounds they did already have, and needed to press those letters into dual use for their old and new sounds as well. But this time, the letters of choice were the ones that had originally been for /p/, /b/, or /w,u/. And that is visible in the languages of India as well as the Middle East and Europe. So there is clearly more of a tendency to associated labiodentals with bilabials than with dentals.


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## Forero

Delvo said:


> ...
> What about any that ended up as /f/ in Latin? I don't know of examples, or how they would have happened if there are any.
> ...


e.g. _fumus_, _facio_, _foveo_.


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## berndf

Delvo said:


> the letters of choice were the ones that had originally been for /p/, /b/, or /w,u/


It was not a matter of choice but of allophonic distribution that developed in Aramaic. [v], [ɣ], [ð], [x], [f] and [θ] are allophones of /p/, /g/, /d/, /k/, /p/ and /t/ respectively (spirantisation of non-emphatic stops in non-geminated intervocalic or in final position) and not phonemes in there own rights.


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## sotos

I couldn't find any cases of "th" becoming "f" in Greek, but then I thought of the Ancient Gr. _Θάττον_ (fast) and Fast. Conventional etymology claims that the meaning of "rapid" evolved from the meaning of "firm". It might. If "fast" meaned "slow", still the etymology seems reasonable.
Also notice that the capital Θ is like  Φ rotated 90, or the ancient Θ variant with the cross inside circle after horizontal line is removed.


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## berndf

Ancient Greek had no _th_-sound.


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## sotos

berndf said:


> Ancient Greek had no _th_-sound.


Said who?


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## berndf

Everybody. Look at any textbook. The development of the aspirated stops into fricatives started in the early Roman period. There is some evidence of an earlier fricative _theta _in Spartan (Laconian) but that is isolated.


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## CapnPrep

There are a small number of examples of θ > f (or more specifically ð > θ > f) in the history of French: 

Lat _modus _> müeθ > _meuf_/_mœuf_ "musical mode; grammatical mood" (replaced now by _mode_)
Gmc *bladu > bleθ > _blef_ "wheat" (mod. _blé_); or possibly *bladu > blaðo > blavo > _blef_ (cf. _emblaver_) 

Celt *bedo > bjɛθ > _bief _"river/canal reach"
many placenames in _-beuf_ (Marbeuf, Elbeuf, etc.), derived from ON _budh _"shelter"

possibly Lat _sitim_ > _soif_ "thirst", but it is also suggested that this _f_ is analogical to words like _nivem > noif_ "snow" (mod. _neige_)


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## sotos

How about the relation _fiera - θηρίο - tier_  ? 

Regarding the phonem _th_ in classical Greek, in original research I find only assumptions and indications, which in textbooks pass as probability and in forums as certainty. In Plato, Thaietetus, the confusion with T  can be  understood as an example of "spelling mistake" at an era when alphabet and spelling were not standarized. 
http://www.livius.org/site/assets/files/4511/sherd_themistocles_agora_mus1.jpg
The same happens in modern Greek, e.g. μισθός - μιστός (salary). (_psilosis_ of theta)


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## berndf

Nobody ever said that τ and θ were pronounced the same in Classical Greek. τ was unaspirated (like an Italian _t_) and θ aspirated (like a German _t_). Classical Greek had a tree-way distinction [d]-[t]-[tʰ] (_delta-tau-theta_) where other languages have only two-way distinctions, German and Chinese [t]-[tʰ] and Italian, Spanish, etc [d]-[t].


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## Dan2

sethmachine said:


> where I live in North East US, we do not even use the phoneme 'th' as in thing, instead th is replaced by f in speech.





Delvo said:


> [sethmachine] must have meant southeast, where this actually is common, not northeast, from which I have never encountered it at all. The southeast is where the black and Irish portions of the population are highest


Although the original quote is from seven years ago, it's in the archives and is so misleading that it really should be challenged, and I'm glad Delvo has done so.

But Delvo, with respect to what you say,
1. Do you really think seth lived in the Southeast but thought he lived in the Northeast?  My guess is that either he was intentionally misreporting or exaggerating the pronunciation facts (he was later banned, after all) or was referring to an African-American community in the Northeast.  In my experience /f/ for "th" is often heard among African Americans (but even among this group, retaining "th" is more common) and is extremely rare outside this group.

2. Can you be more specific about people of Irish descent in the Southeastern US replacing "th" with /f/?  In what cities or states?

Thanks for any clarifications.


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## Delvo

Dan2 said:


> Do you really think seth lived in the Southeast but thought he lived in the Northeast?


No, I just know that "north" and "south" get switched a lot in those compounds words with "east/west", and couldn't connect his statement about the Northeast with the actual Northeast in any way... and probably missed the part about him living where he was talking about.



Dan2 said:


> My guess is that either he was... or was referring to an African-American community in the Northeast.


I agree. Apparently, when I recall familiar examples of Northeasterners and their speech, the list I can come up with seems short on people who also happen to be black.



Dan2 said:


> Can you be more specific about people of Irish descent in the Southeastern US replacing "th" with /f/?  In what cities or states?


My main experience with this was while living in a rural county in the middle of the Florida peninsula: Sumter County, the biggest town in which had almost 3000 people. I worked in forestry back then, which included fighting wildfires, which occasionally brought me into contact with other rural fire teams from all over the state and a few other southeastern states. They didn't all convert θ→f, but the fact that some did, including some of the whites, stood out to me because I had never heard it from white people in my life before moving there.


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## sotos

sotos said:


> How about the relation _fiera - θηρίο - tier_  ?


Any opinion?


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## Forero

sotos said:


> sotos said:
> 
> 
> 
> How about the relation _fiera - θηρίο - tier_?
> 
> 
> 
> Any opinion?
Click to expand...

That makes sense to me (It. _fiera_ - Lat. _fera_ - Gk._ θηρ_(_ίοv_) - Eng. _deer_ - Ger._ Tier_), but there are other possibilities for Latin _fera_. However, Æolian for _θηρ_ was φ_ηρ_, right?


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## berndf

_Deer/Tier _has a different root but _fera _and _θηρ _are indeed cognate.


Forero said:


> Æolian for _θηρ_ was φ_ηρ_, right?


As far as I know yes. But φ was an aspirated p and not an f. It It a general characteristic of Aeolian that kw changed to p and correspondingly that kwh changed to ph.


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## franknagy

The old Cyrillic alphabet consisted the Greek letter Θ. It was an ecclesiastic tradition but the Russian language did not have the Greek sound denoted by /Θ/. In an certain step of simplificaton of the Russian character set the *Θ* omitted and its was replaced by was replaced by *Ф* in the words pronounced as *f*. That is way _ari*th*metics_ is  ари*ф*метика in Russian.


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## Garraay

huhmzah said:


> Wow - that's really interesting. I know that in the Tunisian dialect of Arabic the equivalent of "there is/are..." is officially: "thamma" (ثمة) /θəmːa/ which is a direct borrowing from a rarely used Classical/Standard Arabic term with roughly the same meaning -- but fairly often Tunisians pronounce and even write "thamma" as "famma".



Hassaniya, which is another form of Arabic spoken in Mauritania, exhibits the same sound change for exactly the same word, except that a further development has voiced the /f/ into /v/: _θamma > famm > vamm_. In Hassaniya it's used as an adverb of place unlike in Tunisian: _gəst dāṛu yaqayr mā ṛayt vamm ši_ 'I went to his house but I didn't find anything there.'


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## djara

huhmzah said:


> Wow - that's really interesting. I know that in the Tunisian dialect of Arabic the equivalent of "there is/are..." is officially: "thamma" (ثمة) /θəmːa/ which is a direct borrowing from a rarely used Classical/Standard Arabic term with roughly the same meaning -- but fairly often Tunisians pronounce and even write "thamma" as "famma".


More examples of this in Tunisian: بيثر|بيفر bithar/bifar (fig); ثوم|فوم thum/fum (garlic)


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## apmoy70

Apologies for the OT but I didn't want to start a new thread, how could one explain in linguistic terms the mechanics of the mediaeval voiceless dental fricative /θ/ turning into the voiceless velar fricative /x/ in MoGr?
Does the presence of ν /n/ play a role? (I mean it's easier to pronounce the cluster /xn/ than the /θn/):
*«Εἰσπροωθέω»* eisproōθéō --> _to push forward_ > *εἰσπροώθνω/*εἰσπρώθνω > εἰσπρώχνω > ΜοGr aphetic *«σπρώχνω»* [ˈsproxno] --> _to push, shove_


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## tonyspeed

Could it be the effect of an outside language on English in days gone by? For instance,  Norman French? For instance,  in Jamaica during slavery the influence of African phonetics spread to anyone not educated in England. th-> d and th-> t


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## Pugnator

yodired said:


> The confusion comes in Balón, Vaso, where v and b and pronounced the same, so we have to learn what words are written with b or v in school and sometimes, people make mistakes.


beati hispani quibus bibere vivere est


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