Comment by ben_w
7 days ago
Interesting, in my accent the "th" in "the" and the "th" in "things" sound the same.
Accents do make spelling reform difficult. For example, some of the people who grew up 5 miles from me (they were Cosham/Portsmouth, I was south Havant) pronounced both these "th"s as… I don't know the linguistic symbol, but something like a "v" or an "f".
Yeah, accents, dialects, preserving history and mutual intelligibility by retaining old or original forms of spelling or otherwise... Lots of reasons for being conservative here.
What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.
EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.
No worries :)
Other than the specific location and the social category of "upper-middle-class", I don't know how to describe my accent. People at school thought I was posh, but I never saw myself that way.
Now I live in Berlin, so I might have started picking up a bit of a German accent (and perhaps an ESL accent if there is such a thing).