Talk:Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩

message: This article is fairly backward in its geographical terminology.  The terms are generally outdated and/or too vague.  "Britain and America" (which has been changed to the United Kingdom and the United States) and "the South", "the North" in relation to Scotland for example.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.31.15.112 (talk) 18:44, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Geographical Terminology

message: I have removed these two paragraphs pending discussion
:Speakers of "Standard" English split into two groups in their articulatory implementation of /θ/ and /ð/: roughly half produce one or both interdentally, whereas the rest produce them with the tongue tip behind the teeth. (/s/ and /z/ show the same variation, but their interdental variants are stigmatized as a lisp and therefore are significantly less common in the adult population than their non-strident counterparts.)
:Some Scots dialects, particularly Ulster Scots, pronounce initial /θ/ as [h], and /ð/ between vowels as [l]. For example mother is pronounced /m'ɑlɹ̩/ in Ulster Scots, and think is pronounced /hɪŋk/ throughout most of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Only a few words beginning /θ/ are affected (think, thing, thanks, nothing /n'ɑhɪn/ and anything /'ɛnɪhɪŋ/) while most words with intervocalic /ð/ are affected in Ulster Scots (father, mother, brother, other, rather and bother amongst others).
Angr rightly put the  tags here.  These statements cannot stand.  Apart from in certain consonant clusters like /ðz/ (clothes), I doubt very much that a significant proportion of speakers of standard English pronounce /ð/ with the tongue behind the teeth.  I can attest that it is definately not true that think has [h] or mother has [l] "throughout most of Scotland".  Sources, please, or these claims cannot remain on the page.  --Doric Loon 16:01, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Problem paragraphs

message: if i am not mistaken, runic didn't distinguish between, or did't include both, voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives. there is a single rune which looks like an angular thorn, the third letter in the futhark. this ought to be mentioned by someone who knows the subject well enough to add it precisely. thanks. Aaronbrick 21:43, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually it did.  The voiceless was represented by the Thorn (letter), and the voiced was represented by the Eth (letter).Cameron Nedland 20:08, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Runic didn't have the eth, only the thorn. The Roman alphabet as used for Old English was expanded to include eth and thorn, but they were used interchangeably: both could have either the voiced or the voiceless pronunciation. It was only in Icelandic (Old and Modern) that thorn is used for the voiceless and eth for the voiced sound. Angr (talk) 20:28, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry. My bad. Here I thought I knew something.Cameron Nedland 19:05, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

text: θ is the phonetic symbol. Between two slashes, which indicate that we are talking about phonemes, you would use /θ/. So we can never write /þ/. But if you are talking about Old English seplling, then by all means use <þ> - between pointy brackets to indicate a grapheme. --Doric Loon (talk) 20:02, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  th rune 

message: The section on phonetic realisation would benefit from a diagram showing the two tongue positions.  Most phonetics books have such a diagram, but these presumably are copyright.  Would anyone here feel competent to draw one?  --Doric Loon 21:41, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Illustrations

message: I am failing the GA nomination.  While there is a lot of good material in the article I felt that the lack of in-line citations and only two references for what is a well known topic in phonology were simply not sufficient.  Also the flow of the article could be improved.  The sections don't follow from one another logically and simply seem to be strong along with out any overriding order (historical, phonological, orthographuc).  Almost but not quite where it needs to be. Eluchil404 22:07, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: GA Nomination

message: Am I only person who knows that the "th" in "the" is shorter, different sound to that in "other". It is infact, at least in my accent quite a bit different, almost like a "th" mixed with an "l" sort of position.
:So what IS your accent?  It is usual for almost any phoneme to show allophonic variations.  The articleshould only mention them if they can are described in scholarly literature. --Doric Loon 19:14, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Th...

message: ...and in at least one case has been transferred into standard English as a neologism: a bovver boy is a thug, a "boy" who likes "bother" (fights). Surely not Standard English just a phonetic spelling representing the /ð/ to [v] realisation. Probably as an indication of the perceived social status of the bother boy. 84.135.240.77 15:08, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I would say it is now standard; at least as standard as "lager lout" and other phrases representing passing social phenomena.  At any rate, it's in several dictionaries that I have lying around here.  --Doric Loon 16:49, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Which dictionary? It's not on Merriam-Websters, American Heritage, Reference.com, a few other online dictionaries and encyclopedias (including Wikipedia) just redirect to Skinhead and make no mention of the term, and even Wiktionary doesn't have an entry. For what it's worth, I had never heard of the term until I viewed this page, and believe it to be chiefly (well, exclusively, really) British. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have heard an American use the word "bother" in that way, anyways. And even if that pronunciation is "fairly widespread," I would like to see some evidence it has any popularity in America, since I also feel that is somewhat relegated to Britain. Eebster the Great (talk) 05:30, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''Bovver boy'' Standard English? 

message: If one actually takes time to read this article, it turns out to be highly repetitive. This is a common problem around here, as people contribute without reading everything that has been written before. Anyway, it ought to be tightened up. I'm not doing it now because it would take more time and effort than I feel like spending these days. --194.145.161.227 22:53, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeh, there's  a reason for that.  A few weeks ago someone merged a whole lot of material from another article, and did it so clumsily that although I spent over an hour tidying it up I still haven't ironed out the hicups.  In particular, the historical section needs completely rearranged.  Feel free: I don't have time, and to be honest I can't be bothered.  I spent so much time writing this article that I find it disspiriting to have to redo it all after someone messed everything around.  So, you have a go.  --Doric Loon 23:27, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, thanks - I guess I'm going to do something about it at one point or another. --194.145.161.227 14:38, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm the "someone", thanks. It looked "clumsy" because I don't actually know anything about the subject myself, and so I figured it was better to err on the side of inclusion; if you felt the addition was a net negative you could have asked me to do more. But ironically it's all probably going to have to be reverted anyway, I now find out. That material was originally added to the article T by the user User:Macaw 54, who it now turns out was a sock puppet of a serial plagarist and so it's all likely in violation of copyright (see Talk:T#Macaw 54). So this is a dispiriting time all around, it seems. Bryan 00:32, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

text: I guess it can't hurt to try. Wikipedia:Long term abuse/Primetime indicates that his source of choice is Encyclopedia Britannica, so even if he doesn't respond that'd be a good place to start looking. Since plagarism in and of itself isn't illegal, just the copyright violation part, perhaps if we can cite and rewrite the "good bits" sufficiently that they contain the same information but expressed in a different way we'll be okay. I suspect the sheer volume of material he added to T may be too big a task for that, but the stuff I split out to this article might be salvageable. Feeling a bit better now. :) Bryan 17:24, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article 

message: The article Th (digraph) has very little text in it, and some of what is at Pronunciation of English th is actually about other languages, and the overall history of the digraph. I think the two should be merged. FilipeS 21:10, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh no, not again!  Merges on this article seem to end up with me doing all the work to fix the seams.  But OK, that's not an argument.  I think a merge would be unhelpful.  This article is about English, and including unrelated languages would not benefit it.  Trying to reshape this article so it is about all languages equally would destroy it.  Having said that, much of the info in Th (digraph) is already here: the pronunciation in German, Welsh, and in Gaelic (which is almost Irish) are all mentioned.  The bit about Thai is nonsense: Thai doesn't use our alphabet, ergo it doesn't have the th-digraph.  The digraph is used when transcribing Thai, and has the same value it has when transcribing Sanscrit, which this article already mentions.  So there is no new insight to carry across, and just listing more and more languages brings no extra value. To be honest, I would just vote for deletion of Th (digraph) - it is so superficial, and trying to cover lots of unrelated languages under the umbrella of their arbitrary use of a spelling convension seems to me not the way linguists work.    --Doric Loon 23:10, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, yes they do belong here, because they explain the English situation (which for example reference to Albanian wouldn't).   There is no harm in having information in two places, especially if one of them is cursory and links to the other.  The account of the history of the digraph here is very brief, almost stub-like, because that is all that is required for present purposes.  But a full account of the history of the digraph wouldn't belong here, and if you think it would be useful to have one then by all means write it up poperly at Th (digraph).  But don't MOVE it, which is the lazy option: write what that article needs.  --Doric Loon 09:54, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Perhaps I should explain more precisely why I selected the details I did for the history of the digraph section.  This article is really about the history and complexity of the English sounds.  85% of it is on English phonetics and phonology.  The last 15% is really just short notes on why English uses these letters for these sounds.  There are three types of sounds associated with these letters, so there are three short sections charting the history of these three phoneme-grapheme relationships from origins down to English (including other languages only when they influence some words in English).  The last section is just a pointer to the fact that the digraph can do completely different things in other languages, hence a the reference to Gaelic.  This is kept very short because its purpose is only to put English in perspective as not being the only system.  A proper explanation of Gaelic lenition is not attempted in this three-line section, however, as that belongs elsewhere.  I hope that helps to show how this very carefully thought-out article, into which a vast amount of work has been invested, has a clear integrity as an account of a phenomenon in English.  So please don't mess with it on a whim.  Go instead to Th (digraph) and create something equally good there.  --Doric Loon 10:07, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Thanks.  Let's see if we can't do something worthwhile with Th (digraph) instead. --Doric Loon 07:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge Th (digraph) into this article

message: The introduction states that for the phonemes the tongue can be either between the teeth or behind the upper teeth.  I agree for theta, but as a native speaker, I find it almost impossible to make a  /ð/ with my tongue behind the upper teeth.  Instead, if I don't stick out my tongue, I place it behind my lower teeth.  Kdammers 04:18, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure - not every native speaker would do this.  I do it in certain collocations, for example in "clothes", where it is easier to get to the s if the th is not properly interdental. I think the statement is right: the allophones exist. --Doric Loon 16:04, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:   /ð/  tongue placement 

message: This is only one word I can think of in which 'th' is pronounced like this, but (at least the way I say it) 'posthumous' has 'th' pronounced almost like 'ch'. Like I said, it's only one word, so I'm not sure it worthy of a mention on this article, but I thought I would bring it up. DrJorin (talk) 13:52, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another pronunciation 

message: I have heard people saying "thank you" as "sank you". What causes this?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Minihag a (talk • contribs) 09:22, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Th as S?

message: In the article it states, in layman's terms no less, that /smuːð/ and /smuːθ/ are acceptable pronunciations of the word 'smooth'.
Now I don't know what country uses the latter pronunciation, but it sure isn't Australia- and most probably other countries in the Anglosphere.
This probably needs changing.
En-AU Speaker (T)</span> (C) (E) 04:36, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. Jakob37 (talk) 03:42, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Smooth? 

message: 1. Arthur (Welsh has /θ/ medially: /ærθɨr/) - isn't it /arθr/?
2. brothel, Ethel - if we are including proper names, how about Bothell, a suburb of Seattle? Rimes with brothel. Also, are you sure Ethel doesn't come from Hebrew, Aramaic, etc. What is it's origin?
3. Speaking in general, some discussion in this section about the relationship between pronunciation and morpheme boundaries would not be amiss. Jakob37 (talk) 03:51, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: In Welsh, Arthur is . Ethel is of Anglo-Saxon origin; it comes from the Old English word for "noble". (The þ/ð was voiced in Old English, so I don't know why it's become voiceless in the Modern English name.) +Angr 08:38, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  medial position - comments 

message: In British English (my accent is somewhere between RP and Estuarine), I would pronounce the medial ‹th› in both earthen and earthenware with /θ/. Similarly, I would pronounce the final ‹th› in loath and loathe as homonymous with /ð/ and I've never heard froth (the verb) with a /ð/.
Finally, the medial ‹th› in bathing could be either /θ/ or /ð/ for a reflexive verb — "I was bathing the baby" could be /bɑːθɪŋ/ or /beiðɪŋ/; the self-reflexive "I was bathing in the pool" would only be /beiðɪŋ/ — OwenBlacker (Talk) 23:55, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Then be bold! But best get a reference for anything you change. I personally do distinguish loath and loathe, but otherwise I agree with both you and Owen Blacker. --Doric Loon (talk) 08:24, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation queries 

message: nu'in on new yawk? I'm from queens and my Th is a light D or T (but never CH even in cluster Thr) and I know for sure im not alone  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.190.208.141 (talk) 22:18, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: New York

message: The section "Acquisition problems" says that the lisp "is by far the most common speech impediment in English". This is unsourced, and I think it's almost certainly untrue. Inability to pronounce "r" is a common problem; it wouldn't surprise me if it's more common than the lisp. But even if it's not, saying the lisp is "by far" the most common is wrong. So I'm going to change it to "is a common speech impediment in English". Duoduoduo (talk) 15:39, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite right. --Doric Loon (talk) 15:52, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: By far the most common speech impedimant (?)

message: @Doric Loon: You wrote "it only makes sense to have one each for initial, medial and final position. Otherwise why not have even more?"  Maybe I'm wrong, but I think these are the only examples. (Or are there some I'm not aware of?) If I'm right, I don't think it makes sense to list three out the four examples but not the fourth.  Duoduoduo (talk) 16:08, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No, there are more further down the page: teeth:teethe, mouth (noun) : mouth (verb) etc. For phonemic comparisons, just one minimal pair in each of the three positions is what you would normally give - hence further down also the then-zen-den sets are structured the same way. (Actually, one pair is enough to prove a phonemic relationship, but since some phonemes are only distinct in certain positions, like d and t in German, which merge in final position, it is more satisfying to have three.) But you are right, there are not many minimal pairs, and if you think it appropriate you can certainly make your point somewhere in the detailed list further down the article. Though to be honest, I doubt if thou (=thousand) is standard enough to be worth bringing in - feels rather contrived, the kind of thing I would only cite for the sake of being cute. But if you really use it, well ok. --Doric Loon (talk) 21:04, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Number of examples

message: If anyone is looking for some refs to back up a lot of this article you may want to check out the OED entry for th. In fact a good bit of this article seems to have been taken from the OED entry, including examples. pschemp | talk 22:14, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Refs

message: I (and most of my family members) pronounce "thank" and its derivatives with /ð/ – an exception to the rule that only function words have initial /ð/. Does anyone else do this? (suoı̣ʇnqı̣ɹʇuoɔ · ʞlɐʇ) nɯnuı̣ɥԀ 20:28, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I've never heard that, and would be interested to know where you come from, or whether you belong to any particular sociolinguistic grouping. If you are a native speaker and it is part of your language, then that is highly interesting, and certainly not wrong. For the moment, I wouldn't add it to the article though.--Doric Loon (talk) 16:42, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ðanks 

message: This article uses "alveolar sibilant" interchangeably with "alveolar fricative". The former term is maybe a bit more intuitive, but rather uncommon (as evidenced by the fact that it's a redlink). We should be consistent. Should we either use the former (and create a redirection to alveolar fricative) or the latter? — Sebastian 10:59, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Since nobody replied, I changed the one remaining instance of “alveolar sibilant” to “alveolar fricative”. ◄ Sebastian 13:48, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, "alveolar sibilant" may be a redlink, but "alveolar fricative" is a redirect, which is only marginally better. A sibilant is a kind of fricative. They are not interchangeable, but all sibilants are fricatives. Your change has made this slightly less precise. I don't think it makes much difference, though. --Doric Loon (talk) 16:30, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the change, though not essential, is perfectly fine. English has no non-sibilant alveolar fricatives and "fricative" is indeed a much more widely recognized term. Nardog (talk) 18:12, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alveolar sibilant 

message: The list at  was recently expanded to contain some rather unusual words, such as “Louth”. Now the question arises: Where do we draw the line? Is the list intended to be complete or as a list of examples? ◄ Sebastian 13:48, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: No, the list is not intended to be complete. We should have as many examples as are necessary to illustrate the point, not more. One of my constant complaints with linguistics articles is that people feel the need to keep adding other examples or details that occur to them without thinking about how it helps the whole text. The result is a clutter that becomes less and less clear to the reader. So I would encourage you to be bold and revert additions that you think aren't really helping.--Doric Loon (talk) 16:36, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a problem with almost every one of these types of lists used in language articles. The de facto rule is to allow any number of examples, as long as they're valid. These lists can never realistically be complete, so there will always be more possible examples to add. Any limit will be arbitrary and will differ from article to article (unless it gets incorporated into a manual of style for linguistics or something). I'm slightly for introducing a limit, but I think the hassle of reverting additions that go over the limit is more than any benefits gained from the limit in the first place. That's not to mention figuring out which examples to keep and which to throw away.--Megaman en m (talk) 16:45, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Those lists of homophonous pairs have been a source of OR and WP:INDISCRIMINATE and only IPs seem to ever edit them. I'd totally be down with axing them, though I'm sure seeking a wider consensus at WT:LING or WT:WPENGLISH or the like is preferable. Nardog (talk) 18:18, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I would agree with axing it. Put two very obvious examples into the text, if they are sourced, and leave it like that. Though I am not convinced we even need that.--Doric Loon (talk) 19:56, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Homophonous pairs 

message: It seems that the IPA only recognizes two strengths of "th" but I can hear three. Let's consider the words "the", "father" and "thought". I think that everyone would agree that out of these three words, "the" has the weakest pronunciation of "th" and "thought" has the strongest. However, does anyone agree with me that the word "father" has a middle-strength pronunciation of "th"? If yes then does anyone know why the IPA does not recognize three strengths of "th"? 95.172.233.137 (talk) 15:12, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not convinced that there are three strengths in my dialect (UK near RP). I think that "this" and "father" are essentially the same, bar the usual additional emphasis on stressed syllables.  -- Q Chris (talk) 11:05, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you, Q Chris, very much for your reply. For me, the "th" in "this" is definitely weaker than the "th" in "father". Imaging saying "far the" (not pronouncing the "r" like Americans and Irish people do) when you intend to say "father". To me, that would sound wrong. What do you think? 95.172.233.137 (talk) 12:43, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

text: Remember that the talk page is not a forum to discuss the topic at hand, rather it's used to talk about how to improve the article.--Megaman en m (talk) 13:33, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: There are two "th"-phonemes in English. Each of them has a variety of allophones. So the voiced sounds in "the" and "father" are the same phoneme, but obviously there will be a slightly different realization depending on whether the sound is in initial or medial position. But try experimenting with minimal pairs. You can hear two different sounds in otherwise identical words if you try saying "thy" and "thigh". You can't get a third one in the same position. --Doric Loon (talk) 22:28, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The 'th' in 'the' and the 'th' in 'father' are exactly the same, as are the all the listed examples. There are only two: eth and thorn 2601:182:4381:E60:244F:964C:E05F:5BA2 (talk) 17:57, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Three strengths of "th" not two??