Pronunciation Q: "thee" or "thuh"?

[Nars Glinley]

Which do you use or do you use both? If both, when do you use each?

[Dr. Drake]

"Theee" is the stressed pronunciation, used for emphasis and often before vowels. "Thuh" is unstressed, used in general.

Theee elephant is *theee* bomb.
Thuh rhinoceros is the lesser pachyderm.

[Suburban Plankton]

"Thee" before a vowel sound.
"Thuh" before a consonant sound

"Thee" answer, my friend, is blowin' in "thuh" wind...

[pulykamell]

"Thee" before a vowel sound.
"Thuh" before a consonant sound

"Thee" answer, my friend, is blowin' in "thuh" wind...

Years ago I remember hearing on NPR a linguistic analysis on the pronunciation of "the", and it was also found that most people pronounce it "thee" when the word is used in a--I forget the word for it--pause or hesitation position in speech. It was something like, "I picked up the...whaddaycallit...the...um...the transaxel toric discombobulator at the hardware store on the way home." In this case, the report stated the word "the" was pronounced with a long vowel sound.

[Roland Orzabal]

Years ago I remember hearing on NPR a linguistic analysis on the pronunciation of "the", and it was also found that most people pronounce it "thee" when the word is used in a--I forget the word for it--pause or hesitation position in speech. It was something like, "I picked up the...whaddaycallit...the...um...the transaxel toric discombobulator at the hardware store on the way home." In this case, the report stated the word "the" was pronounced with a long vowel sound.Doesn't seem like all that remarkable a conclusion. Were I to say the quote in question, I would pronounce it "I picked up thuh...whaddayacallit...thee... um...thuh transaxel toric discombobulator", etc., which is consistent with the consonant/vowel rule; the "thee" in the middle is pronounced with the foreknowledge that I'm going to be saying "um" as the next word.

Do you recall if any common exceptions to this rule were noted, or can anyone else think of any?

[pulykamell]

OK. I think I may have found the study. Trying to google for "the" presented itself with some complications, but I managed to snake my way through it. Here's one article:


Jean Fox Tree and Herb Clark, Pronouncing "the" as "thee" to signal problems in speaking, Cognition 62 (1997) 151 - 167.

Abstract:
In spontaneous speaking, the is normally pronounced as thuh, with the reduced vowel schwa (rhyming with the first syllable of about). But it is sometimes pronounced as thiy, with a nonreduced vowel (rhyming with see). In a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation, speakers were found to use thiy to signal an immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production. Fully 81% of the instances of thiy in the corpus were followed by a suspension of speech, whereas only 7% of a matched sample of thuhs were followed by such suspensions. The problems people dealt with after thiy were at many levels of production, including articulation, word retrieval, and choice of message, but most were in the following nominal


From here. (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/2005_07.html)

There's a bunch more on the topic if you poke around on that site, and check out the links.

[Siam Sam]

"Thee" before a vowel sound.
"Thuh" before a consonant sound

"Thee" answer, my friend, is blowin' in "thuh" wind...
Same same for me. Except also one uses "thee" before a consonant for stress; for example, "He is THE man to see."

[Crawlspace]

Do you recall if any common exceptions to this rule were noted, or can anyone else think of any?Yeah, you could grow up on Long Island.