The palate () is the roof of the

mouth In animal anatomy, the mouth, also known as the oral cavity, or in Latin cavum oris, is the opening through which many animals take in food and issue vocal sounds. It is also the cavity lying at the upper end of the alimentary canal, bounded on t ...

in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity. A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other

tetrapod Tetrapods (; ) are four-limb (anatomy), limbed vertebrate animals constituting the superclass Tetrapoda (). It includes extant taxon, extant and extinct amphibians, sauropsids (reptiles, including dinosaurs and therefore birds) and synapsids (p ...

s, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly separated. The palate is divided into two parts, the anterior, bony hard palate and the posterior, fleshy soft palate (or velum).

Structure

Innervation

The maxillary nerve branch of the trigeminal nerve supplies sensory innervation to the palate.

Development

The hard palate forms before birth.

Variation

If the fusion is incomplete, a cleft palate results.

Function

When functioning in conjunction with other parts of the mouth, the palate produces certain sounds, particularly velar, palatal, palatalized,

postalveolar Postalveolar or post-alveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the ''back'' of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but no ...

alveolopalatal In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (or alveopalatal) consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simultaneous alveolar and palatal arti ...

, and uvular

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced ...

History

Etymology

The English synonyms palate and palatum, and also the related adjective palatine (as in palatine bone), are all from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

''palatum'' via

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligi ...

''palat'', words that like their English

derivatives The derivative of a function is the rate of change of the function's output relative to its input value. Derivative may also refer to: In mathematics and economics *Brzozowski derivative in the theory of formal languages *Formal derivative, an ...

, refer to the "roof" of the mouth. The Latin word ''palatum'' is of unknown (possibly Etruscan) ultimate origin and served also as a source to the Latin word meaning palace, '' palatium'', from which other senses of palatine and the English word palace derive, and not the other way round. As the roof of the mouth was once considered the seat of the sense of

taste The gustatory system or sense of taste is the sensory system that is partially responsible for the perception of taste (flavor). Taste is the perception produced or stimulated when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with taste recepto ...

, palate can also refer to this sense itself, as in the phrase "a discriminating palate". By further extension, the flavor of a food (particularly beer or wine) may be called its palate, as when a wine is said to have an oaky palate.

Bibliography

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References

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