suprunp
Senior Member
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2011
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Ukrainian
- Home Country
- Ukraine
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in th'UK.
Yes. That's why I wrote post #2. Sorry about the typo in my response, which may have confused you.Yet again, may I ask you whether you can actually hear it?
Yes. That's why I wrote post #2.
She says the quickly but it's quite distinct to me. If you want to hear some barely-there the's, try listening to some Yorkshire English speakers. They often reduce it to t', realized as a stop or even a lengthening of the following consonant when it's a t.
The Yorkshireman produces a long stop between "going to" and "dogs". That's his way of pronouncing the definite article. If he had omitted the article, he would have said "going to dogs" rather than "going to' ... dogs". His to sounds almost like toot.
Watch some British TV series set in Yorkshire and you'll soon think otherwise. He prolonged the article a bit to emphasize it, but that's one extreme of the way it's pronounced up there. Yorkshire speakers don't omit their definite articles, they just pronounce them differently.I took his pause as a way of emphasizing his point - the definite article would be left out ('there wouldn't be 'the'') by anyone he'd meet in the street. I doubt people produce long stops there as a substitute for the definite article (i.e. would say it the way the Yorkshireman did).
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