Comment by Dwedit

4 hours 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.

Both schwa for me unless I was trying to draw particular attention to the apple and denote it was rather significant.

Yeah, 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.

British 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'.

  • Also 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".