Rule for Pronouncing “The”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kim, and I’m calling from Chicago, Illinois.

Hi, Kim.

How are you both?

Super duper, and yourself?

I’m doing great.

Well, I was sitting down with my son in the living room, and we were, he’s learning to read.

And at the end of each of his little books, it says, the end.

And so he started asking me, you know, because obviously it looks like the.

And so I explained to him that if there’s a vowel after the word the, that you pronounce it the.

And my husband, who is my walking dictionary, so he turns around from the computer.

He was working and he said, no, the and the are two different words.

And I said, no, I remember from grade school that you pronounce it a different way depending on the word that comes after it.

So we decided to bring in our 13-year-old who should be learning this about now or last year.

And she had never heard of it.

And so I decided to write you.

And so then I put on my Facebook page that I was going to be on the way with words and how excited I was.

Kim, let’s go back just a second.

I want to ask you something about your husband.

You call him your walking dictionary, and yet he claimed that T-H-E is two words.

What did he mean by that?

He meant that there’s T-H-E-E and there’s T-H-E.

Well, those are different words, but they’re not the same word.

That those are different words.

Yeah.

And that the is always pronounced the.

Oh, wow.

We just want to short circus all the—I mean, it’s clear that you really touched a nerve with people.

This is kind of incredible.

I expect we’ll get a flood of email because we’re talking about this.

Yeah, I’m fascinated.

But you’ve got it right.

It’s all about the consonant or vowel that follows controls the pronunciation of T-H-E.

Well, now, wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Well, the sound.

The sound.

No, no, no, no, no.

This is fascinating to me, Kim, because you’re teaching your kids this rule really early on.

That if the E in the word T-H-E comes before a vowel, then it’s a long E, right?

Right, right.

So it’s the apple.

Right, the apple, the ocean, the orange.

And if it comes before a consonant, then it’s more of a schwa sound, like the.

The dog, the cat, the car.

Right.

Yeah.

Now, what fascinates me about this is that I somehow, my mother was an English teacher.

I had a good education.

I never heard this for decades.

I didn’t learn it until I was almost into my 30s.

Really?

Nobody ever told me this.

Me either.

I learned it in junior high, and it stuck with me.

I mean, I went through K through 8 school, so I learned it in either 7th or 8th grade.

And it stuck with me.

It was one of those things that has stuck with me.

And I’m never wrong when it comes.

I mean, I’m never wrong with English when it comes with my husband.

There’s an exception.

There is one exception, a little asterisk footnote here, which is for emphasis, you can say the in front of any word at all.

Yeah.

And you hear politicians do that a lot.

And Kermit the frog.

Right.

So if you’ve got a golden apple, you might say this is the apple that fell from the tree and hit me on the head.

Yeah, this is the radio show.

Yeah, not the other apple, this apple.

This is the apple.

Yeah.

And there’s another thing here, too, which is, frankly, vowels tend to schwa in English.

So even when we say the E sound and we say it very briefly, a lot of times it still sounds like, oh, because we just talk so fast.

Vowels tend to go,

Yeah.

But you’re right that this was taught as a rule that if it comes before a vowel, it’s going to be an E sound.

If it comes before a consonant, it’s an

But somehow Grant and I missed it.

It went right over our heads.

And I had it pointed out to me, and I was shocked.

I was absolutely shocked.

Well, you know, this is a really interesting question, Kim.

We’re going to just explode this.

We’re going to set some C4 along the corners of the Internet.

And then step back a few hundred yards and light that fuse and see what happens, all right?

And if everyone wants to join us, find us on Facebook or Twitter.

Or on our website in our discussion forums, and we’ll all talk about this together.

And if we come up with an answer, we’ll share it on a future show, okay?

This has been the most interesting call we’ve had in a while.

Not really.

So technically right, but…

No, it’s completely right, but not everyone learned what you learned.

Yeah, you’re right.

That’s the rule, but it’s not always taught.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool, Kim.

Thanks.

Well, thank you for your help.

And props to you for educating that 13-year-old properly.

Have a great day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

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