La Liseuse
How do YOU pronounce the word 'with'?

Just the other day I was browsing Richard's thread about the two ways of saying 'often'  -  with or without the 't', in case you missed it - and I saw Starry Night's comment about the two pronunciations of 'with'.  Well, that was a revelation! I never knew that there were two ways to pronounce 'with'....

After a short session with Professor Google, I was better informed.  Apparently,  the 'th' at the end of 'with' is pronounced with a voiced consonant - like at the end of 'breathe' - in England and in some parts of the US (especially the north and east). Meanwhile, in Scotland, Ireland, and other parts of the US (especially the west and south), it's apparently common to pronounce it with a voiceless consonant - like at the end of 'breath'.   

Is that true, I wonder? And what about other parts of the English-speaking world? Let's find out:

A couple of simple questions for all native speakers:

1.   How do you pronounce the 'th' at the end of 'with'? 

        a.  as in 'breath'    /θ/ 

        b.  as in 'breathe'  /ð/

2.  If you answered 'a' above, do you pronounce it differently if there's a vowel after it?  For example, is there a difference between the 'th' sound in the way you say 'with Bob' and 'with Anne'?  How about 'without'?

3.   Where are you from? ( country and region)

Looking forward to hearing from representatives of as many different regional accents as possible.





Jan 28, 2019 8:45 PM
Comments · 58
8
Good joke, Ashwani Lakh!
January 28, 2019
7
It’s not at all surprising that Dan Smith and native speakers didn’t even notice the difference at first. As Coligno points out, the difference between voiced and unvoiced TH is not contrastive in English. This is a good example of the importance not just of learning to notice the difference between sounds, but of learning to ignore those differences when appropriate. To a speaker of Latin American Spanish, the voiced and unvoiced TH are like night and day — the first being perceived as the letter D and the second as the letter S. Of course, the reverse is true for English speakers, to whom D and S don’t necessarily sound like TH. (Although many regional variants of English do substitute D/T for voiced and unvoiced TH, this is considered “non-standard”.) 

January 31, 2019
7

Yes, that was the part where I 'mispoke', Starry Night. I had in my mind "not dissimilar to" and "not too different from", and I messed up and combined them. 

Double bonus points for you, as it was your comment which was the inspiration for all this discussion.



January 29, 2019
7
This might be off-topic, but it may be interesting to note that Old English didn’t contrast voiced and unvoiced continuants at all. (I believe this is like today’s Dutch.) That’s why we have GH (as in “night”) but no KH, TH but no DH, and why F changes into V in words like “life” and “wife”. The situation changed when the Norman French took over: Suddenly, you didn’t want to confuse “fine” and “vine” or “poisson” and “poison”. The GH mostly became silent (or unvoiced /f/), the TH split into voiced and unvoiced phonemes, as did the F/V (which are now spelled accordingly).

January 29, 2019
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