The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
Previous entry.
8:33am on Saturday, 23rd May, 2026:
Rant
When a word in English ends in a vowel sound and is followed by another word that begins with one, it interrupts the flow of a sentence. Therefore, a filler sound is inserted between them to make them easier to say. The first vowel sound may be modified, too.
For example, if you say "the cat" then there's no problem. The "the" sounds the same as it would in "the dog", it's like a "thuh". However, if you were to say "the other cat" then the usual solution is to insert a "y" sound and change the "thuh" to "thi". This makes it sound like "thiyother cat".
That's how it's been for centuries, at least where I come from. However, back in the 1980s I noticed that some Londoners didn't do this. They kept the "the" sound as "thuh" and put a glottal stop in as the filler. It would be like "the'other cat". I was told once that this came from the speech patterns of immigrants from the Caribbean, but I don't know if that's true or not.
Anyway, recently the continuity announcer on our local TV channel TV has started to refer to the news programmes in our region as being in "the 'east" rather than "thi yeast". Worse, the presenters have started to do this, too, when they never did it before. I don't know whether it's as a result of some directive or just the spread of a speech affectation. It annoys me, anyway.
I'll have to listen out to hear whether they pronounce something like "solo opening" as "solowopening" or "solo'opening".
I'd blame social media,. but that would just ba a different kind of trend-following.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).