Pronunciation of English th
Encyclopedia
In English, the digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

 ⟨th⟩
Th (digraph)
Th is a digraph in the Roman alphabet. It is the most common digraph in order of frequency in the English language.-Cluster /t.h/:The most literal use of ⟨th⟩ is to represent a consonant cluster of /t/ and /h/ as in English knighthood...

 represents in most cases one of two different phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s: the voiced dental fricative
Voiced dental fricative
The voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound, eth, is . The symbol was taken from the Old English letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced...

 /ð/ (as in this) and the voiceless dental fricative
Voiceless dental fricative
The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in thing. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential...

 /θ/ (thing). More rarely, it can stand for /t/ (Thailand, Thame [place in Oxfordshire]) or the consonant cluster
Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....

 /t.h/ (lighthouse) or, in some dialects, even the cluster /tθ/ (eighth).

General description

In standard English, both in Britain and the United States, the phonetic realization of the dental fricative phonemes shows less variation than for many other English consonants. Both are pronounced either interdentally, with the blade of the tongue resting against the lower part of the back of the upper teeth and the tip protruding slightly (though less prominently than for the corresponding sound in Spanish) or alternatively with the tip of the tongue against the back of the upper teeth. The interdental position might also be described as "apico-" or "lamino-dental". These two positions may be free variants
Free variation
Free variation in linguistics is the phenomenon of two sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers...

, but for some speakers they are complementary allophones, the position behind the teeth being used when the dental fricative stands in proximity to an alveolar fricative, as in clothes (/ðz/) or myths (/θs/). Lip configuration may vary depending on phonetic context. The vocal folds are abducted. The velopharyngeal port is closed. Air forced between tongue surface and cutting edge of the upper teeth (interdental) or inside surface of the teeth (dental) creates audible frictional turbulence.

The difference between /θ/ and /ð/ is normally described as a voiceless-voiced contrast, as this is the aspect native speakers are most aware of. However, the two phonemes are also distinguished by other phonetic markers. There is a difference of energy (see: Fortis and lenis
Fortis and lenis
In linguistics, fortis and lenis are terms generally used to refer to groups of consonants that are produced with greater and lesser energy, respectively, such as in energy applied, articulation, etc....

), the fortis /θ/ being pronounced with more muscular tension than the lenis /ð/. Also, /θ/ is more strongly aspirated than /ð/, as can be demonstrated by holding a hand a few centimeters in front of the mouth and noticing the differing force of the puff of air created by the articulatory process.

As with many English consonants, a process of assimilation can result in the substitution of other speech sounds in certain phonetic environments. Most surprising to native speakers, who do this subconsciously, is the use of [n] and [l] as realisations of /ð/ in the following phrases:
join the army: /ˈdʒɔɪn ðiː ˈɑːmi/ → [ˈdʒɔɪn niː ˈɑːmi]
fail the test: /feɪl ðə ˈtɛst/ → [feɪl lə ˈtɛst]


/θ/ and /ð/ can also be lost through elision. In rapid speech, sixths may be pronounced like six. Them may be contracted to 'em, and in this case the contraction is often indicated in writing. (In fact, 'em is originally a separate word, a remnant of Old English hem, but as the apostrophe shows, it is perceived in modern English as a contraction.)

Realisation in non-standard Englishes

th-fronting
Th-fronting
Th-fronting refers to the pronunciation of the English "th" as "f" or "v". When th-fronting is applied, becomes and becomes...

: In some areas such as London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, many people realise the phonemes /θ/ and /ð/ as [f] and [v] respectively. Although traditionally stigmatised as typical of a Cockney
Cockney
The term Cockney has both geographical and linguistic associations. Geographically and culturally, it often refers to working class Londoners, particularly those in the East End...

 accent, this pronunciation is fairly widespread, and has recently been an increasingly noticeable feature of the Estuary English
Estuary English
Estuary English is a dialect of English widely spoken in South East England, especially along the River Thames and its estuary. Phonetician John C. Wells defines Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England"...

 accent of South East England. It has in at least one case been transferred into standard English as a neologism: a bovver boy is a thug, a "boy" who likes "bother" (fights). Joe Brown and his Bruvvers was a Pop group of the 1960s. The song "Fings ain't wot they used t'be" was the title song of a 1959 Cockney comedy.

th-stopping
Th-stopping
Th-stopping is the realization of the dental fricatives as stops, which occurs in several dialects of English. In some accents, such as Hiberno-English, some varieties of Newfoundland English, some varieties of New York Dialect, and Indian English, they are realized as the dental stops and as...

: Many speakers of Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English is the dialect of English written and spoken in Ireland .English was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of the late 12th century. Initially it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country...

 use voiceless
Voiceless dental plosive
The voiceless dental plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is t_d...

 and voiced
Voiced dental plosive
The voiced dental plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is...

 dental plosives /t̪, d̪/ (still usually distinct from alveolar /t, d/) instead of, or in free variation with, the fricatives /θ, ð/.

th-alveolarization
Th-alveolarization
Th-alveolarization is a process that occurs in some African varieties of English where the dental fricatives /ð, θ/ merge with the alveolar fricatives /z, s/. It is often parodied as ubiquitous to French-speaking learners of English, but it's widespread among many foreign learners of English,...

: In African American Vernacular English
African American Vernacular English
African American Vernacular English —also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular , or Black Vernacular English —is an African American variety of American English...

, /ð/ is often pronounced [d], especially in unstressed words (for example the, them, with).

th-debuccalization
Th-debuccalization
Th-debuccalization is a process in varieties of Scots and Scottish English where a voiceless dental fricative at the beginning of a word and between vowels becomes the voiceless glottal fricative . It is a stage in the process of lenition....

: In many varieties of Scottish English
Scottish English
Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....

, /θ/ becomes /h/ word initially and intervocalically.

Acquisition problems

Children generally learn the less marked
Markedness
Markedness is a specific kind of asymmetry relationship between elements of linguistic or conceptual structure. In a marked-unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one...

 phonemes of their native language before the more marked ones. In the case of English-speaking children, /θ/ and /ð/ are often among the last phonemes to be learned, frequently not being mastered before the age of five. Prior to this age, many children substitute the sounds [f] and [v] respectively. For small children, fought and thought are therefore homophones. As British and American children begin school at five, this means that many are learning to read and write before they have sorted out these sounds, and the infantile pronunciation is frequently reflected in their spelling errors: ve fing for the thing.

Children with a lisp
Lisp
A lisp is a speech impediment, historically also known as sigmatism. Stereotypically, people with a lisp are unable to pronounce sibilants , and replace them with interdentals , though there are actually several kinds of lisp...

, however, have trouble distinguishing /θ/ and /ð/ from /s/ and /z/ respectively in speech, using a single /θ/ or /ð/ pronunciation for both, and may never master the correct sounds without speech therapy. The lisp is a common speech impediment in English.

Foreign learners may have parallel problems. In English popular culture the substitution of /z/ for /ð/ is a common way of parodying a French accent, but in fact learners from very many cultural backgrounds have difficulties with English dental fricatives, usually caused by interference with either sibilants
Sibilant consonant
A sibilant is a manner of articulation of fricative and affricate consonants, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the sharp edge of the teeth, which are held close together. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words sip, zip, ship, chip,...

 or stops
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...

. Words with a dental fricative adjacent to an alveolar sibilant, such as clothes, truths, fifths, sixths, anesthetic, etc., are commonly very difficult for foreign learners to pronounce.

A popular advertisement for Berlitz language school plays on the difficulties Germans may have with dental fricatives http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOTpIVxji8.

Phonology and distribution

In modern English, /θ/ and /ð/ bear a phonemic relationship to each other, as is demonstrated by the presence of a small number of minimal pair
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...

s: thigh:thy, ether:either, teeth:teethe. Thus they are distinct phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s (units of sound, differences in which can affect meaning), as opposed to allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

s (different pronunciations of a phoneme having no effect on meaning). They are distinguished from the neighbouring labiodental fricatives, sibilants and alveolar stops by such minimal pairs as thought:fought/sought/taught and then:Venn/Zen/den.

The vast majority of words in English with ⟨th⟩ have /θ/, and almost all newly created words do. However, the constant recurrence of the function words, particularly the, means that /ð/ is nevertheless more frequent in actual use.

The distribution pattern may be summed up in the following rule of thumb which is valid in most cases: in initial position we use /θ/ except in certain function words; in medial position we use /ð/ except for certain foreign loan words; and in final position we use /θ/ except in certain verbs. A more detailed explanation follows.

Initial position

  • Almost all words beginning with a dental fricative have /θ/.
  • A small number of common function words (the Middle English anomalies mentioned below) begin with /ð/. The words in this group are:
  • 5 demonstratives: the, this, that, these, those
  • 2 personal pronouns each with multiple forms: thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself; they, them, their, theirs, themselves, themself
  • 7 adverbs and conjunctions: there, then, than, thus, though, thence, thither (though some speakers pronounce thence and thither with initial /θ/)
  • Various compound adverbs based on the above words: therefore, thereupon, thereby, thereafter, thenceforth, etc.
  • A few words have initial ⟨th⟩ for /t/ (e.g. Thomas): see below.

Medial position

  • Most native words with medial ⟨th⟩ have /ð/.

  • Between vowels: heathen, fathom; and the frequent combination -ther-: bother, brother, dither, either, father, Heather, lather, mother, other, rather, slither, southern, together, weather, whether, wither, smithereens; Caruthers, Gaithersburg, Netherlands, Witherspoon, and similar compound names where the first component ends in '-ther' or '-thers'. But Rutherford has either /ð/ or /θ/.
  • Preceded by /r/: Worthington, farthing, farther, further, northern.
  • Followed by /r/: brethren.

  • A few native words have medial /θ/:
  • The adjective suffix -y normally leaves terminal /θ/ unchanged: earthy, healthy, pithy, stealthy, wealthy; but worthy and swarthy have /ð/.
  • Compound words in which the first element ends or the second element begins with ⟨th⟩ frequently have /θ/, as these elements would in isolation: bathroom, Southampton; anything, everything, nothing, something.
  • The only other native words with medial /θ/ would seem to be brothel and Ethel.

  • Most loan words with medial ⟨th⟩ have /θ/.
  • From Greek: Agatha, anthem, atheist, Athens, athlete, cathedral, Catherine, Cathy, enthusiasm, ether, ethics, ethnic, lethal, lithium, mathematics, method, methyl, mythical, panther, pathetic, sympathy
  • From Latin: author, authority (though in Latin these had /t/; see below). Also names borrowed from or via Latin: Bertha, Gothic, Hathaway, Othello, Parthian
  • From Celtic languages: Arthur (Welsh has /θ/ medially: /ærθɨr/); Abernathy, Abernethy
  • From Hebrew: Ethan, Jonathan, Bethlehem, Bethany, leviathan, Bethel
  • From German: Luther, as an anglicized spelling-pronunciation (see below).
  • Loanwords with medial /ð/:
  • Greek words with the combination -thm-: algorithm, logarithm, rhythm. Also asthma, though here the ⟨th⟩ is nowadays usually silent.

  • A few words have medial ⟨th⟩ for /t/ or /th/ (e.g. lighthouse): see below.

Final position

  • Nouns and adjectives
  • Nouns and adjectives ending in a dental fricative usually have /θ/: bath, breath, cloth, froth, health, hearth, loath, sheath, sooth, tooth/teeth, width, wreath.
  • Exceptions are usually marked in the spelling with ⟨-the⟩: tithe, lathe, lithe with /ð/.
  • blythe, booth, scythe, smooth have either /ð/ or /θ/.
  • Verbs
  • Verbs ending in a dental fricative usually have /ð/, and are frequently spelled ⟨-the⟩: bathe, breathe, clothe, loathe, scathe, scythe, seethe, sheathe, soothe, teethe, tithe, wreathe, writhe. Spelled without ⟨e⟩: mouth (verb) nevertheless has /ð/.
  • froth has either /θ/ or /ð/ as a verb, but only /θ/ as a noun.
  • The verb endings -s, -ing, -ed do not change the pronunciation of a ⟨th⟩ in the final position in the stem: bathe has /ð/, therefore so do bathed, bathing, bathes; frothing with either /θ/ or /ð/. Likewise clothing used as a noun, scathing as an adjective etc.
  • Others
  • with has either /θ/ or /ð/ (see below), as do its compounds: within, without, outwith, withdraw, withhold, withstand, wherewithal, etc.

Plurals

  • Plural ⟨s⟩ after ⟨th⟩ may be realised as either /ðz/ or /θs/:
  • Some plural nouns ending in ⟨ths⟩, with a preceding vowel, have /ðz/, although the singulars always have /θ/; however a variant in /θs/ will be found for many of these: baths, mouths, oaths, paths, sheaths, truths, wreaths, youths exist in both varieties; clothes always has /ðz/ (if not pronounced /kloʊz/, the traditional pronunciation).
  • Others have only /θs/: azimuths, breaths, cloths, deaths, faiths, Goths, growths, mammoths, moths, myths, smiths, sloths, zeniths, etc. This includes all words in 'th' preceded by a consonant (earths, hearths, lengths, months, widths, etc.) and all numeric words, whether preceded by vowel or consonant (fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths /eɪtθs/, twelfths, fifteenths, twentieths, hundredths /hʌndrədθs/, thousandths).
  • Booth has /ð/ in the singular and hence /ðz/ in the plural for most speakers in England. In American English it has /θ/ in the singular and /θs/ or /ðz/ in the plural. This pronunciation also prevails in Scotland.

Grammatical alternation

In pairs of related words, an alternation
Alternation (linguistics)
In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a phoneme or morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant...

 between /θ/ and /ð/ is possible, which may be thought of as a kind of consonant mutation
Consonant mutation
Consonant mutation is when a consonant in a word changes according to its morphological and/or syntactic environment.Mutation phenomena occur in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern Celtic languages...

. Typically [θ] appears in the singular of a noun, [ð] in the plural and in the related verb: cloth /θ/, clothes /ð/, to clothe /ð/. This is directly comparable to the /s/-/z/ or /f/-/v/ alternation in house, houses or wolf, wolves. It goes back to the allophonic variation in Old English (see below), where it was possible for ⟨þ⟩ to be in final position and thus voiceless in the basic form of a word, but in medial position and voiced in a related form. The loss of inflections then brought the voiced medial consonant to the end of the word. Often a remnant of the old inflection can be seen in the spelling in the form of a silent ⟨e⟩, which may be thought of synchronically as a marker of the voicing.

Regional differences in distribution

The above discussion follows Daniel Jones
Daniel Jones (phonetician)
Daniel Jones was a London-born British phonetician. A pupil of Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne , Daniel Jones is considered by many to be the greatest phonetician of the early 20th century...

' English Pronouncing Dictionary, an authority on standard British English
British English
British English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...

, and Webster's New World College Dictionary, an authority on American English
American English
American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

. Usage appears much the same between the two. Regional variation within standard English includes the following:
  • The final consonant in with is pronounced /θ/ (its original pronunciation) in northern Britain
    Great Britain
    Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

    , but /ð/ in the south, though some speakers of Southern British English use /θ/ before a voiceless consonant and /ð/ before a voiced one. A 1993 postal poll of American English
    American English
    American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

     speakers showed that 84% use /θ/, while 16% have /ð/ (Shitara 1993). (The variant with /ð/ is presumably a sandhi
    Sandhi
    Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words...

     development.)
  • In Scottish English
    Scottish English
    Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....

    , /θ/ is found in many words which have /ð/ further south. The phenomenon of nouns terminating in /θ/ taking plurals in /ðz/ does not occur in the north. Thus the following have /θs/: baths, mouths (noun), truths. Scottish English does have the termination /ðz/ in verb forms, however, such as bathes, mouths (verb), loathes, and also in the noun clothes, which is a special case, as it has to be clearly distinguished from cloths. Scottish English also has /θ/ in with, booth, thence etc., and the Scottish pronunciation of thither, almost uniquely, has both /θ/ and /ð/ in the same word. Where there is an American-British difference, the North of Britain generally agrees with America on this phoneme pair.

Germanic origins

Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

 (PIE) had no dental fricatives, but these evolved in the earliest stages of the Germanic languages. In Proto-Germanic, /ð/ and /θ/ were separate phonemes, usually represented in Germanic studies by the symbols *đ and *þ.
  • *đ (/ð/) was derived by Grimm's law
    Grimm's law
    Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

     from PIE *dʰ or by Verner's law
    Verner's law
    Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...

     (i.e. when immediately following an unstressed syllable) from PIE *t.
  • *þ (/θ/) was derived by Grimm's law from PIE *t.

In West Germanic, the Proto-Germanic *đ shifted further to *d, leaving only one dental fricative phoneme. However, a new [ð] appeared as an allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

 of /θ/ in medial positions by assimilation of the voicing of the surrounding vowels. [θ] remained in initial and presumably in final positions (though this is uncertain as later terminal devoicing would in any case have eliminated the evidence of final [ð]). This West Germanic phoneme, complete with its distribution of allophones, survived into Old English. In German and Dutch, it shifted to a /d/, the allophonic distinction simply being lost. In German, West Germanic *d shifted to /t/ in what may be thought of as a chain shift, but in Dutch, *þ, *đ and *d merged into a single /d/.

The whole complex of Germanic dentals, and the place of the fricatives within it, can be summed up in this table:
PIE Proto-Germanic West Germanic Old English German Dutch Notes
*t *[þ] [θ] /d/ /d/ Original *t in initial position, or in final position after a stressed vowel
*[đ] [ð] Original *t in medial position after a stressed vowel
*d /d/ /t/ Original *t after an unstressed vowel
*dʰ Original *dʰ in all positions
*d *t *t /t/ /s/ or /ts/ /t/ Original *d in all positions


For more on these phonemes from a comparative perspective, see Grammatischer Wechsel
Grammatischer Wechsel
In historical linguistics, the German term Grammatischer Wechsel refers to the effects of Verner's law when viewed synchronically within the paradigm of a Germanic verb.-Overview:...

. For the developments in German and Dutch see High German consonant shift
High German consonant shift
In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological development that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost...

.

Old English

Thus English inherited a phoneme /θ/ in positions where other West Germanic languages have /d/ and most other Indo-European languages have /t/: English thou, German du, Latin tu.

In Old English, the phoneme /θ/, like all fricative phonemes in the language, had two allophones, one voiced and one voiceless, which were distributed regularly according to phonetic environment.
  • [ð] (like [v] and [z]) was used between two voiced sounds (either vowels or voiced consonants).
  • [θ] (like [f] and [s]) was spoken in initial and final position, and also medially if adjacent to another unvoiced consonant.


Although Old English had two graphemes to represent these sounds, ⟨þ⟩ (thorn) and ⟨ð⟩ (eth
Ð
A Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...

), it used them interchangeably, unlike Old Icelandic, which used ⟨þ⟩ for /θ/ and ⟨ð⟩ for /ð/.

Development up to Modern English

The most important development on the way to modern English was the investing of the existing distinction between [ð] and [θ] with phonemic value. Minimal pairs, and hence the phonological independence of the two phones, developed as a result of three main processes.
  • In early Middle English times, a group of very common function words beginning with /θ/ (the, they, there, etc.) came to be pronounced with /ð/ instead of /θ/. Possibly this was a sandhi
    Sandhi
    Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words...

     development; as these words are frequently found in unstressed positions they can sometimes appear to run on from the preceding word, which may have resulted in the dental fricative being treated as though it were word-internal.
  • English has borrowed many words from Greek
    Greek language
    Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

    , including a vast number of scientific
    Science
    Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

     terms. Where the original Greek had the letter ⟨θ⟩ (theta), English retained the Late Greek pronunciation /θ/, regardless of phonetic environment (thermometer, methyl, etc.). In a few words of Indian origin, such as thug, ⟨th⟩ represents Sanskrit थ (/tʰ/) or ठ (/ʈʰ/), usually pronounced /θ/ (but occasionally /t/) in English.
  • English has lost its original verb inflections. When the stem of a verb ends with a dental fricative, this was usually followed by a vowel in Old English, and was therefore voiced. It is still voiced in modern English, even though the verb inflection has disappeared leaving the /ð/ at the end of the word. Examples are to bathe, to mouth, to breathe.


Other changes which affected these phonemes included a shift /d/ → /ð/ when followed by unstressed suffix -er. Thus Old English fæder became modern English father; likewise mother, gather, hither, together, weather. In a reverse process, Old English burthen and murther become burden and murder.

Dialectally, the alternation between /d/ and /ð/ sometimes extends to other words, as bladder, ladder, solder with /ð/. On the other hand some dialects retain original d, and extend it to other words, as brother, further, rather. The Welsh
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

 name Llewelyn appears in older English texts as Thlewelyn (Rolls of Parliament
Rolls of Parliament
The Rolls of Parliament were the official records of the English Parliament and the subsequent Parliament of the United Kingdom. They recorded meetings of Parliament and Acts of Parliament....

 (Rotuli parliamentorum) I. 463/1, King Edward I or II), and Fluellen (Shakespeare, Henry V). Th also occurs dialectally for wh, as in thirl, thortleberry, thorl, for whirl, whortleberry, whorl. Conversely, Scots
Scots language
Scots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster . It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in most of the western Highlands and in the Hebrides.Since there are no universally accepted...

 has whaing, whang, white, whittle, for thwaing, thwang, thwite, thwittle.

The old verb inflection -eth (Old English -eþ) was replaced by -s (he singeth → he sings), not a sound shift but a completely new inflection, the origin of which is still being debated. Possibilities include a "de-lisping" (since s is easier to pronounce there than th), or displacement by a nonstandard English dialect.

⟨th⟩ for /θ/ and /ð/

Though English speakers take it for granted, the digraph ⟨th⟩ is in fact not an obvious combination for a dental fricative. The origins of this have to do with developments in Greek.

Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

 had an aspirated
Aspiration (phonetics)
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...

 /dʱ/ which came into Greek as /tʰ/, spelled with the letter theta. In the Greek of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

 and Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 this was still pronounced /tʰ/, and therefore when Greek words were borrowed into Latin theta was transcribed with ⟨th⟩. Since /tʰ/ sounds like /t/ with a following puff of air, ⟨th⟩ was the logical spelling in the Latin alphabet.

By the time of New Testament Greek (koiné), however, the aspirated stop had shifted to a fricative: /tʰ/→/θ/. Thus theta came to have the sound which it still has in Modern Greek
Modern Greek
Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic...

, and which it represents in the IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

. From a Latin perspective, the established digraph ⟨th⟩ now represented the voiceless fricative /θ/, and was used thus for English by French-speaking scribes after the Norman Conquest, since they were unfamiliar with the Germanic graphemes ð (eth) and þ (thorn). Likewise, the spelling ⟨th⟩ was used for /θ/ in Old High German
Old High German
The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...

 prior to the completion of the High German consonant shift
High German consonant shift
In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological development that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost...

, again by analogy with the way Latin represented the Greek sound.

The history of the digraphs ⟨ph⟩ for /f/ and ⟨ch⟩ for Scots, Welsh or German /x/ is parallel.

⟨th⟩ for /t/

Since neither /tʰ/ nor /θ/ was a native sound in Latin, the tendency must have emerged early, and at the latest by medieval Latin, to substitute /t/. Thus in many modern languages, including French and German, the ⟨th⟩ digraph is used in Greek loan-words to represent an original /θ/, but is now pronounced /t/: examples are French théâtre, German Theater. In some cases, this etymological ⟨th⟩, which has no remaining significance for pronunciation, has been transferred to words in which there is no etymological justification for it. For example German Tal ('valley', cognate with English dale) appears in many place-names with an archaic spelling Thal (see Neanderthal
Neanderthal, Germany
The Neandertal is a small valley of the river Düssel in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, located about east of Düsseldorf, the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia. The valley belongs to the area of the towns Erkrath and Mettmann...

). The German family names Theuerkauf and Thürnagel are other examples. The German spelling reform of 1901 largely reversed these, but they remain in some proper nouns.

Examples of this are also to be found in English, perhaps influenced immediately by French. In some Middle English manuscripts, ⟨th⟩ appears for ⟨t⟩ or ⟨d⟩: tho 'to' or 'do', thyll till, whythe white, thede deed. In Modern English we see it in Esther, Thomas, Thames, thyme, Witham and the old spelling of Satan as Sathan. In a small number of cases, this spelling later influenced the pronunciation: amaranth, amianthus and author have spelling-pronunciations with /θ/, and some English speakers use /θ/ in Neanderthal.

⟨th⟩ for /th/

A few English compound
English compound
A compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme.English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their components.-Compound nouns:...

 words, such as lightheaded or hothouse, have the letter combination ⟨th⟩ split between the parts, though this is not a digraph. Here, the ⟨t⟩ and ⟨h⟩ are pronounced separately (light-headed) as a cluster of two consonants. Other examples are anthill, outhouse, lighthouse, pothead, Chatham, Wytham, Yetholm; also in words formed with the suffix -hood: knighthood, and the similarly formed Afrikaans loanword apartheid. In a few place names ending in t+ham the t-h boundary has been lost and become a spelling pronunciation, for example Grantham.

See also

  • Pronunciation
    Pronunciation
    Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....

  • English pronunciation
  • Received Pronunciation
    Received Pronunciation
    Received Pronunciation , also called the Queen's English, Oxford English or BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to the relationship in other European languages between their standard varieties and their regional forms...

  • Spelling pronunciation
    Spelling pronunciation
    A spelling pronunciation is a pronunciation that, instead of reflecting the way the word was pronounced by previous generations of speakers, is a rendering in sound of the word's spelling.-Examples of English words with common spelling pronunciations:...

  • Non-native pronunciations of English
    Non-native pronunciations of English
    Non-native pronunciations of English result from the common linguistic phenomenon in which non-native users of any language tend to carry the intonation, phonological processes and pronunciation rules from their mother tongue into their English speech...

  • English orthography
    English orthography
    English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of habits to represent speech sounds in writing. In most other languages, these habits are regular enough so that they may be called rules...

  • Thorn
    Thorn (letter)
    Thorn or þorn , is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the rune in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the...

  • Eth
    Eth
    Eth is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese , and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line through the vertical stroke...

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