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Featured Article: “The”

Why Does It Have Two Different Pronunciations?

Zach Mainzer

Welcome back to the featured article, where we have finally reached the third and final article in the English language: the. “The” differs from “a” and “an” in that “the” is a definite article (meaning that you assume others know which object you are talking about when you use “the”), while “a” or “an” are used to introduce an object to an audience. For instance, if your baseball coach tells you to “catch the ball,” you know which ball he is talking about, whereas if he tells you to “catch a ball,” that sounds like a desperate plea for you to just catch any one of many balls.

Now that we know the function of “the,” we can focus on another aspect of the word: its pronunciation. Take a moment to read the following sentence aloud: I ate the apple. Now say this: I ate the pear. More likely than not, you said that you ate “thee” apple, but ate “thuh” pear. These are two distinct pronunciations of the exact same word, uttered by the exact same person. So what is the official pronunciation of “the”? Is one preferred over the other, or are they both equally acceptable? According to Merriam-Webster, the is pronounced “thē” (thee) when it comes before vowels, but pronounced “thǝ” (thuh) before consonants. 

This sounds pretty simple, though this rule has one caveat. Merriam-Webster holds that we use thē “for emphasis before titles and names or to suggest uniqueness.” Now the pronunciation of “the” takes on a whole new meaning. It can emphasize importance or surprise, or it can demonstrate indifference and apathy. If a person tells you that he met with the (thuh) President, he shows that he finds this relatively normal. If his friend, however, responds with “The (thee) President of the United States,” he shows that this has a unique significance, and the fact that he uses “thē” presents an attitude of amazement or even shock. It seems that the different pronunciations of “the” can indicate different emotions. 

In this way, the simple pronunciation of “the” very closely resembles the tone of voice that we associate with a number of words, both in its function and in its difficulty to illustrate in written English. To present tone, we often make use of different punctuation, but punctuation still does not give us the nuance of the emotions presented by speech. An excited “He sat on the bench!” has a very different tone than a furious “He sat on the bench!” yet the sentences appear to be identical on paper. This is even more difficult in the case of the pronunciation of “the,” since writers will not include “thē” or “thǝ” to describe the specific pronunciation they imagine. The reader doesn’t get a clear picture of the amount of excitement conveyed by a “the” the way that a listener can hear a “thee” as opposed to a “thuh.” 

This can, however, shed some light onto the beauty of spoken language. Not only does it present ideas using actual words, but it demonstrates emotion and feeling using tone, inflection, and–in the rare case of “the”–even pronunciation. Human beings have harnessed spoken language and transformed it into much more than a series of words; spoken language now has a unique role in humor, distinguishes between sarcasm and seriousness, and might convey a subtle variation between an inviting, comforting sentiment and condescension. And the pronunciation of “the” magnifies the level of understanding that we can acquire from the speech of other people. The role of “the” in our speech clearly demonstrates the thousands upon thousands of levels of understanding that we gain just by listening to other people. 
Sadly, we have exhausted the list of articles, so this will be the last featured article. I know I had a good time exploring an obscure category of adjective and I hope you had almost as much fun as I did. Even though the featured article is complete, we are not done exploring the quirks and nuances of English. So stay tuned for the next edition, when we discover new areas of grammatical oddity.

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