ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION SUBTLETIES ‘The’ is pronounced in two ways, depending upon

ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION SUBTLETIES

‘The’ is pronounced in two ways, depending upon the first sound of the word that follows it. It is pronounced as /tha/ when followed by a consonant sound, and as /thi/ when followed by a vowel sound. This is a rule of English pronunciation.

Eg: He got into the(/tha/) car.

He got into the(/thi/) auto.

This is a wonderful example of how pronunciation evolves to eliminate the work involved in phonetic transitions. Russian is so hard for me because the pronunciation is in the top of the throat rather than the top of the mouth and center of the tongue, so strange Russian consonant transitions are comfortable for Russian speakers, and almost impossible to comprehend for english speakers. We use our tongues to transition between phonemes in precisely the opposite way.

All of us will sound chinese in the end. That’s the laziest set of transitions we have evolved so far. From clicks and clucks to singing in 200k years.

(first paragraph from Quora, for my ukrainian friends)