3 ms·
There's also "the" vs "the". As in "the boy ate the apple". First 'the' ends with a schwa sound. Second 'the' ends with 'ee' sound.
by Dwedit 8d ago
There's also "the" vs "the". As in "the boy ate the apple". First 'the' ends with a schwa sound. Second 'the' ends with 'ee' sound.
- Ylpertnodi 8d agoBritish English speaker: for me, the two 'e's' have the same sound. The boy The apple. Though I do say 'thee end' My Brother says 'barth', I say 'bath'.
- IshKebab 8d agoAlso native British. I would say "thee apple" would be by far the more common pronunciation in op's example but I probably wouldn't blink if someone said "thuh apple".
- hrnnnnnn 8d agoBoth schwa for me, native speaker who grew up in Scotland.
- kentosi 7d agoAustralian native speaker here. Only the first "the" is a schwa for me. Must be tied to how we both pronounce the first "a" in apple differently.
- IanCal 8d agoBoth schwa for me unless I was trying to draw particular attention to the apple and denote it was rather significant.
- globular-toast 8d agoYeah, these are different for me as a southern Englishman. Languages generally try to avoid glottal stops. French has a lovely system called liaison where a consonant sound will appear to separate two consecutive vowels. In English we like diphthongs so I guess we use this similarly to liaison. Some accents just use glottal stops, though, nay bother.
- mathieuh 8d agoIt’s actually something that is changing in English right now. In some languages like German all word-initial vowel sounds are pronounced with a glottal stop at the start (a so-called “hard attack”) but English generally doesn’t (or didn’t) do that, resulting in “thee apple”. Younger speakers are starting to use hard attack before word-initial vowel sounds so the “thee” variant isn’t present for them. I’m not sure if this also affects “a” vs “an” (i.e. I don’t know if younger people are starting to say e.g. “a apple”) because that obviously makes an orthographical difference so it might be more persistent. Although I suppose they coud say both “an” and begin the next word with a glottal stop. Keep an ear out if you’re listening to a younger native English speaker and you might be able to hear it.