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Is there a resource for determining how common one or the other is in English? I doubt that it varies between BrE vs AmE etc

Jim Mack
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  • Could you provide information about any research you have already done – dubious Feb 22 '23 at 16:17
  • Have you tried googling "frequency of english phonemes" or similar? (First you should consider what exactly you want to know.) – Stuart F Feb 22 '23 at 16:23
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    Why the "diphthongs" tag? – user888379 Feb 22 '23 at 16:42
  • No, it doesn't but it does vary between BrE/AmE and Irish English. The Irish use t for the unvoiced th. – Lambie Feb 22 '23 at 17:57
  • The etymology is usually a giveaway. /ð/ appears overwhelmingly in articles, demonstratives, conjunctions, quantifiers, and other function words, where it's Germanic in origin (a product of Grimm's Law, in fact). /θ/, on the other hand, appears overwhelmingly in lexical items, often borrowed from Greek. – John Lawler Feb 22 '23 at 20:05
  • My untutored ear tells me that where 'th' occurs in a word makes a difference. in the middle of words of two or more syllables the hard 'th' seems to predominate (i.e. I can only come up with 'Arthur' as a soft 'th' word). Where 'th' is at the end of a word it seems to be usually soft, as in 'bath', 'sloth' except with a final 'e' (as in lathe'). But I am not being scientific. It's a suggesting possible starting point. – Tuffy Feb 22 '23 at 23:27
  • @user888379 - sheer incompetence? – Jim Mack Feb 23 '23 at 15:45
  • @StuartF - the specific question was looking for a way to find that out, so, it's a bit circular to ask if I searched for the thing I was asking about how to look for :-) – Jim Mack Feb 23 '23 at 15:48
  • @Tuffy: you're not actually saying much different from John Lawler, but it may not be obvious. You're right that non-initial 'th' is often voiced /ð/, but these cases are mearly always inherited Germanic words, and often the result of a grammatical change, (such as bath -> bathe, or breath -> breathe, or mouth -> mouth). In Greek derived words it is usually unvoiced /θ/ even between vowel: mathematical, pathetic, hypothermic. Rhythm (and rhythmic) is an exception, and Gothic is an exception the other way (not Greek). – Colin Fine Feb 23 '23 at 17:00
  • @ Colin Fine. Yes, that is fair. Thank you. – Tuffy Feb 23 '23 at 17:13

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Your answer is here. I'm not sure why you couldn't find it...

https://github.com/prendradjaja/phoneme-frequencies/blob/master/local_target/q1_frequencies

ð = 2.99%

θ = 0.40%

Greybeard
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