I can still remember my first grade teacher teaching us about it. I thought it was interesting.
I have no idea if this was taught in first grade , I didn’t get my first hearing aid until I finish my second year in first grade. I have no idea what was taught in first grade !
I probably use \ði:\ (pardon my terrible IPA) for emphasis, mainly. I don’t recall being taught to determine the vowel used by the beginning of the next word, no.
Don’t apologize, you got it right! (Never mind the colon made of tiny triangles; the ordinary dots will work here just fine.) I’m just glad to see IPA being used here.
I was so taught, but only because I was in choir, where the distinctions matter more, and proper pronunciation is paramount, due to holding out words longer.
That said, I mostly used it correctly automatically before then. It just sounds wrong to say “thuh apple.” The vowels run into one another. I do note that one properly uses “thee” for emphasis, even before consonants.
I’m not a fan of the elongation symbol used on words that are invariably short, nor in phonemic situations, unless the length itself is phonemic. And I’m not a huge fan of a special symbol () for English phonemes. I get that it’s supposed to cover multiple dialects, but that should be available for all languages if so, not treating English as special.
I’m pretty sure I learned this rule at some point along the way, but I’ve thought of it as a descriptive rather than a prescriptive rule: This is how people “automatically” say it, instead of This is how you’re supposed to say it.
No, and this is the first time I’ve heard of it. If this is really a rule, why don’t they cover it in college classes for English-teachers-to-be? It certainly never came up in any of my courses.
I rarely hear “thee” out in the wild, but that may be a result of northeastern accents.
I’m just not picking it up. I don’t hear “thee” unless preceded by “tis of”. Maybe something like “thih” instead of “thuh”, but “thee” seems pretty rare.
It may be misleading to spell it “thee.” “Thee” gives the mistaken impression that it’s a more long, drawn-out sound. “The” before a vowel and “the” before a consonant are both short words, but the “e” in the former sounds like an e, while the “e” in the latter sounds like a schwa.
Say “the apple” and “the banana.” Or “the end” and “the beginning.” Do you pronounce “the” the same way both times?
First hit for an interview with “Cage The Elephant”: here. (For some reason, that’s the first phrase that came to mind when I thought of “the” being pronounced as “thee” before a word with a vowel sound.) Name is mentioned at 0:20. That’s what people are talking about when they mean “thee” instead of “thuh.” This is extremely common in my dialect. The vowel is more like /ði/ rather than /ði:/ (so the length of the “ee” isn’t as long as the “ee” in “thee”, but it’s the same phoneme. It’s definitely not an /ɪ/, or what is sometimes called a “short i” like the “i” in “this.” And it’s definitely not a schwa, like it is in the standard unstressed pronunciation of “the.”
And here it is in UK English in the phrase “the opposite of infinity.”
They dont because there is no such rule, nor is there a “proper” way to use it. Thereby you poll contains no correct answer.
I only use "for emphasis before titles and names or to suggest uniqueness often ˈt͟hē " and have never heard of any other usage.
I don’t think I ever learned this “rule”, but I think you’re right in that it is the way that most people will naturally say “the” in American English. If I say “the apple” or “the orange” I do unthinkingly follow the rule, but I’ve never noticed anyone not following it and thinking it sounded weird. At most I would think it was a different in dialect or accent, just like saying “da” or “duh” for “the”.
I do read a lot and pick up words from books that I’ve never or rarely heard aloud, and if I said one of those wrong and someone corrected me I’d be a little embarrassed but appreciate it. But if someone corrected my pronunciation of “the” I’m pretty sure I’d laugh in their face for being so pedantic. And while I was a good little kid and respectful of adults, I think I would have done the same thing then. Or I’d be skeptical then listen closer to how everyone spoke, and remember every adult that violated it and bring it up to the pedantic adult.
Your points are correct. The pronunciation changes because the mouth adjusts to the next syllable to pronounce. I am not a phoneticist, not even a Phoenician, but this is the bane of ontology, to granularize everything including pronunciations. There are an endless number of sounds between ‘uh’ and ‘ee’ that will be made by the mouth in speech to transition between syllables, this barely used and rarely known rule is attempting to pick two discreet sounds that don’t conform to actual speech.
ESL speaker here (German). I was taught (pretty early, probably in the first year of learning English) to use /ðiː/ when the next word begins with a vowel, /ðə/ else. (The standard taught then was British RP and mostly it still is)
You are doing the exact opposite of fighting ignorance.
This rule applies in my dialect. But it’s not a prescriptive “rule” in the sense that people are taught at school to speak this way. It’s just an observation of how people naturally pronounce the word “the” in different contexts.
The only people that I would see needing to be taught it as an explicit rule are learners of English as a foreign language.
Exactly. People don’t need to be taught the phonological rules of their native language. If someone is mispronouncing one the five most common words of their native language, it’s probably the result of (what is known in linguistics as) hypercorrection, and I sincerely doubt that children would be doing that. Hypercorrection happens when people ignorantly change their perfectly correct natural speech because they believe they have to follow some “rule.”
Children rarely engage in hypercorrection. If they do, it’s usually because some parent or other adult has been ignorantly haranguing them to follow some “rule.”