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We were taught in school that when followed by a noun starting with a vowel sound, "the" is pronounced "thee". In other cases, it's pronounced "thuh" (aside from the emphatic "the").

I have noticed that some Americans say "thuh only" and "thuh hour" (these are the only examples I could find off the top of my head). Is this just a regional accent thing or are there exceptions to the simple rule I was taught in class?

gjy
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  • Certainly in Britain I predominantly hear 'thee apple' etc. I can think of one friend who said, 'thuh apple' but he was an exception. I can't speak for the USA. – chasly - supports Monica Sep 02 '15 at 22:23
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    @Araucaria: that question is open, so anyone is free to add a better answer there or to add comments suggesting improvements to the existing answers. – herisson Sep 03 '15 at 00:03
  • @sumelic Yes, but no-one will. The question's too old. And the answers too bad. – Araucaria - Him Sep 03 '15 at 00:04
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    @Araucaria: That's a strange attitude. If the answers are all bad, surely it's even more important to write a good one? In fact, that should make it easier to write an answer that outshines all the others. And why does the age of the question matter? – herisson Sep 03 '15 at 00:06
  • @sumelic Well, no. Several problems here. Firstly, the purpose of gamifying SE sites backfires here because virtually no active voting members bother to vote on nearly dead threads. Secondly, there's no chance of a decent answer climbing to the top of the pile at that stage. This means that giving a good answer is actually likely to be detrimental to a vast majority of readers here who don't vote and wouldn't consider themselves "experts" - because they would, and should, naturally assume that the info in that answer is bad - otherwise it wouldn't be languishing at the bottom of the pile. – Araucaria - Him Sep 03 '15 at 00:12
  • @sumelic That is if they ever bother to read that far down the answers. – Araucaria - Him Sep 03 '15 at 00:13
  • @sumelic However, I am familiar with your accomplished phoneticness and phonologicality. So I have an enormous list of long forgotten and ignored questions that need good answers, which you could most definitely supply. I can hand it over to you if you are actually going to answer them ;) – Araucaria - Him Sep 03 '15 at 00:18
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    If you think the system is not working properly, you can always make a meta post to bring attention to it. We already have a lot of questions about this topic though, we need to consolidate the answers rather than spreading them out over more places. See what Mari-Lou A did for this question: http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/6934/please-change-the-canonical-ordinal-question-to-one-which-is-more-informative – herisson Sep 03 '15 at 00:20
  • @sumelic That's very kind old bean, but I have a life :D And I'm not sure I agree. Getting a live page going with a decent answer is often better than linking a potentially well-nourished question to a dead end. If the newer one floats, the old one can get closed and linked to the new one. However, that's academic, 'cuz this question, although it deserves an answer, ain't gonna get one! Unless you write it ;) – Araucaria - Him Sep 03 '15 at 00:27
  • @sumelic But I do admire ML's tenacity with regards to that endeavour. – Araucaria - Him Sep 03 '15 at 00:29
  • @Araucaria: well, I don't know what to say. If you truly think the answers there are "severely defective" and "misleading," it seems to me that you should at least downvote them. That doesn't take much effort at all. Anyway, if you have such a high opinion of me, perhaps you'd also like to upvote my answer to the following question, which has a link to a study about the pronunciation of "the": http://english.stackexchange.com/a/233171/77227 – herisson Sep 03 '15 at 00:54

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