English language III.: I | mea hour | an hour

Thee is most certainly not how the is ever spelt. It is only how the is sometimes pronounced.

Geoffrey.

@Geoffrey

If I give thee that extra e it most certainly can be spelt thus.

The v thee update (and thank you njrick for the word play).

Spoke to a French teacher yesterday (both French and teaching French) and asked her opinion. She didn't even need to think about it--thee precedes a noun starting with a vowel (elephant, octopus), the precedes the rest (carousel, steamer).

Sounds good but I haven't taken the time to run through a load of examples.

For late arrivals to this thread, we are not suggesting that the definite article the, should ever be spelt thee.

Geoffrey.

And I think if you do, you will find that the French teacher is absolutely correct. I can't think of any example where we'd pronounce it 'the', rather than 'thee', before a word beginning with a vowel.

The vowel sound in 'the' is, I believe, called the 'schwa' - it's our most common sound, also our laziest: open your mouth and make the easiest, grunt-like sound that comes and that's the schwa. In multi-syllabic words, we tend to stress one syllable in particular (e.g. reMARKable; aMAZing; CORPoral PUNishment) with the result that we are lazier with the vowel sounds in the non-stressed syllables - which are often the schwa (eg. the 'ab' in remarkable; the 'a' at the start of amazing, the 'or' in corporal and the 'ment' at the end of punishment). For some reason, it sounds and feels awkward to follow the schwa with another vowel sound, hence we came up with the longer vowel sound of 'thee'.

Talking of extra Es, but on a different note entirely, here's a true story from my original home county of Yorkshire, told to me many years ago by my always-truthful, dearly-departed father:

A recently bereaved widower ordered a gravestone for his late wife, who'd been a devout Christian. In recognition of her devotion, the epitaph on the stone should, he said, read simply: "SHE WAS THINE".

Summoned a few days later to approve the finished article, he was bewildered to see that it said: "SHE WAS THIN".

"You daft bugger!" he berated the stonemason. "Tha's left off the E!"

Promising to put it right, the man told him to return later that afternoon. But when he did, the widower was more bewildered than ever, for the gravestone now bore the legend:

"E, SHE WAS THIN"

TheEnglishMaster

I laughed a lot at ‘e, she was thin.’

Your entries once again reminds me of Robwords:
[youtube="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUL29y0vJ8Q"]Is English just badly pronounced French?[/youtube]



Do you watch Robwords I remember there is video where he tellls there are 26 sounds in English but only 5 vowels. There he metioned the schwa too.

@ Geoffrey
Just today while I reread a Regency novel I could read the word 'thee'. His wife is named 'elen to represent his dialect. It gets sometimes a bit much if you are not a native speaker.
Worse than Bavarian or the Swiss German.

Thee and thou were a common part of the American Quaker vocabulary until the early part of the 1900's, I think. They still persist in occasional utterances.
I mention American because today almost half the world's Quakers live in Kenya, and of course the religion first breathed life in England.