It just seems way more useful to me to consider pronouns a separate category of words from nouns. (Some reasons are mentioned in that link.)
None of these words are pronounced with the voiced “th” except for the articles like the and this, which is exactly what the post you responded to said.
I have been under the impression that pronouns were nouns since elementary school, which is the last time I heard anything about it until now. If ‘thou’ and ‘that’ are not nouns then my counterexample is a sentence that contains no nouns?
See, school-wise I was always taught as pronouns and nouns being separate classes. It wasn’t until later (college, I’m pretty sure), that I had heard the view some scholars take that the are a subclass of nouns. Both views make some sense to me (like we were classically taught that English had 12 verb tenses, but in linguistics class, under their definition, English only has two. But then there are others even arguing other numbers, as high as 24 (the usual 12 x 2 for active and passive voices), though I see one cite mentioning 26.)
I also thought there were types of words, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and pronouns were a category of nouns. Proverbs are not a category of verbs though. I was born too soon to get a Schoolhouse Rock education so maybe that’s not how it works either. I’m pretty sure about the proverbs, but the pronoun thing is now unclear to me.
Yeah, never had any of those classes. If English were an object oriented language I think pronouns would make sense as a subclass of nouns. Can’t a pronoun be replaced by the noun it refers to in a sentence?
I can’t remember encountering the claim that pronouns were nouns until this very thread.
That is an sign that a serious bifurcation of American grammar education has occurred. Next thing you know people won’t agree on how to teach math.
Heaven forfend!
dhikr, pronounced /ðɪkr/, is making its way into English dictionaries.
“I’m not Jewish, I’m Roman!”
“A wohman, eh?”
“No, no: ROMAN.”
(WHACK)
Anyway…came to chime in about the Welsh “Ll” sound but was beaten to it. I didn’t have much trouble picking it up. The way my teacher explained was, start to say the word “lift” but instead of following through, once your tongue is in place behind your front teeth, you just blow. It sounds like a hissing version of “th” so some non-native speakers use that as a shortcut. I’ve also heard Mancunians sublsitute a “cl” for some reason (" Hi, when’s the next train to Llandudno?" “Clanduhdno? Let me check…”).
Yeth, that wath wolfpup’th point! Being as “th”-y as possible with the initial consonants of random words in a sentence, and all of them that are nouns, verbs, or adjectives show up with the unvoiced “th”.
I don’t really know why that would be his point, since he just restated what was already said.
Is… this the first time you’ve noticed that posts sometimes humorously amplify and illustrate the claims of a previous post, rather than refuting them?
I’m a native English speaker and I don’t get the distinction. Given that people vary pronouncing “the” as “thuh” and “thee” depending what they are stressing, the sound of the “th” is a minor thing to note.
It’s the same distinction (voicing) that separates B & P, or T & D, or J & CH, or S & Z. In a lot of languages, kedding thiz zord off think wrong woult mague you zount fery ott inteet.
You’re saying you don’t get the difference between voiced and unvoiced “th”? It’s the difference between “thin” (unvoiced) and “this” (voiced). Surely you can hear that those words begin with different sounds?
Every language has a unique set of phonemes. To learn a different language, you don’t just have to learn a different grammar, vocabulary, conjugation of words, and declension of words, you have to learn the phonology of the language. Different dialects have different phonemes too. Learn about the one-mary and three-mary dialects of American English:
Given that those words are the common examples of the difference you can presume that I can’t tell the difference.