Bloody embarrassed... how do you all pronounce 'thus' ?

[JellyTots2009]

I'm totally embarrassed just because this happened in front of my partners dad.

I am currently writing up a college assignment and used the word 'thus' in a sentence. Now, not using this word a lot I asked my partner who was standing with his dad if this sentence made sense.
When I pronounced thus all I got was 'it's thus! Thus!' from both of them. Obviously writing it down you don't know how it's said.

I pronounce it 'th-us' like 'fuss' but using 'th' they said it is 'the-us' obviously said as one word and not with a hyphen in.

I know I'm 100% wrong but has anyone else pronounced it my way making my embarrassment less?

Don't tell me how Irish people pronounce words.

Bit rude.
I think the other poster was just making the point that not all Irish people pronounce things the same way as you do. Just like not all English, Scottish or Welsh people pronounce things in the same way.

I know I'm 100% wrong

Erm, you're not 🤔

Ok. I am English with a southern English accent.
I pronounce the th as th not f.
I honestly cannot hear the difference between any of the th sounds in any words.

As you would say this but to rhyme with fuss

I'm laughing at the poster who's so adamant that most of Ireland says "I tink" and "dem over dere" (barring posh Protestants apparently , who knew??) I'm a Dub from a distinctly working class area and our parents and teachers would have come down on us like a tonne of bricks if we didn't pronounce our th's! It was considered very common not to. I'd associate "ting" and "dat" with the very flat, inner city Dublin accent that was quite common when I was young but seems pretty rare nowadays.

Saying that I know my "th" is harder than my English relatives and friends (the ones who don't "fink" or "frow" a ball) and I wonder sometimes if the ear is unaccustomed to the particular sound does it almost assign it a more familiar sound? That probably doesn't make a lot of sense but I think similar to the way the T in Taoiseach isn't quite Tee nor Th but could sound like one or other to the listener, especially if not accustomed to the word/sound? Likewise I know my Londoner SIL doesn't "fink" but to my ear the sound she makes is closer to that than my slightly harder "think".

All you got wrong was not voicing the th

Still rhymes with fuss, though.

Oh god, I'm going to have to record myself singing/not singing them tomorrow aren't I? 😂

Yep, just as I suspected. Both Dubs.

E.g. Cerveza
Spanish pronounce it like Therbeta though the th sound for the c is not exactly a th sound. The b sound for the v is also not exactly a b sound either and the t sound for the z is a very soft t

And to add to the fun, that's only true in some parts of Spain. And it's very much not the case in almost all of Central/South America.

I honestly cannot hear the difference between any of the th sounds in any words

You may not be able to hear it but you probably are saying them differently without really thinking about it. I'm confident of that because I've never ever ever heard anyone in SE England say "this" and "think" with the same "th" sound.

The Irish TH is definitely harder than the soft English TH, but it's rarely a flat out T or D.

The Hiberno English TH tends to be formed with the tongue touching the back of the front teeth just near the tip of the teeth.
For a D or T sound, the tongue needs to touch the ridge of the mouth behind the front teeth.

English soft THs tend to be made with the tongue brushing the tip of the front teeth.

I'm a Dubliner with parents from a south eastern county, and nobody I am related to says dese, dat, dose, tink, etc. I know very few people who speak like that, even among people I went to secondary school with.

The old working class Dun Laoghaire accent, a subset of WC Dublin:

Ronnie Drew interview. The THs are very clear and very consistent. They are not Ts or Ds.

With regard to the voiced and voiceless 'th' it's also interesting to think that they were written differently in times gone past. The voice 'th' was a letter called 'edd'' or 'ed' and the voiceless one a 'thorn' (the 'edd' is written like a 'd' but with the sticky-up bit bowed over to the left and a line through it, and the 'thorn' is a vertical line with a right pointing v somewhere in the middle). This is where the 'ye olde' comes from, where 'ye' is actually 'thorn + e) - throwing up at the same time that this used to be a voiceless 'th' sound in the past and now a voiced one.

Blueberry upstream mentioned the l/r conundrum for many far-eastern folk, which is so easy for us to hear. I have read that the original Hawaiian language was initially written with 'k' and 'l' where it is now written with 't' and 'r' (in western script, obviously) with the different ortographers hearing the sounds made differently/transcribing it differently.

I've always found it interesting to hear that many people from especially non-Chinese far-eastern countries do not pronounce the 't' at the end of words. Happens both in English and in my mother tongue so it's something they simply don't hear from people around them as otherwise their use of the language is as flawless as the next person.

There's a letter in the Scandinavian languages 'y' that has a sound between 'u' and 'i', very hard to get right as a non-native speaker - a true shibbolet. And in Welsh there is a 'u' and 'i' which are pronounced differently in the North and pretty much the same elsewhere. I don't know the different in pronounciation, I'm sure I don't hear it.

Mathanxiety - on the contrary - Ronnie very clearly demonstrates that we do not pronounce TH

The one that always gives me away is 'Thanks a million'. It comes out 'Tanks a million'. Now I just say 'Cheers'!

They must be pulling your leg op

Everyone I've met loves my Irish accent though, so it doesn't bother me that I don't speak the Queen's English. Though they do take the piss outta me at times.
I have to consciously make a concerted effort to pronounce a TH - it doesn't come naturally to me.

Another one that I've found English people do is that they don't pronounce R at the end of words. I remember being in a shop asking for a bottle of water. I think it sounded a bit like waw-sir to the shop assistant, so having tried several times to ask, I eventually said - 'a bottle of waw-tah'. She immediately understood.

And another thing English people seem to do (to my ear anyway), is to add an R to the end of words ending in A. Not always, but sometimes.

I pick up accents really easily. An English accent? Nope. I can put one on, but it's not something that I've assimilated into my own accent.

This is a strong north side Dublin accent. Definitely no TH pronounced.

This is a strong north side Dublin accent. Definitely no TH pronounced.

It is, but that's a very different accent to Ronnie Drew's, Sunlov (I presume you're Flyinga with an unexplained name change?). And the majority of Irish people, whether from Dublin or elsewhere, do not sound like that.

It does rhyme with fuss either way. I can't describe the difference. It is a bit like the difference between this and thistle. How much you aspirate the "th".

But all of us get things wrong sometimes.

Au contraire, Sunlov, Ronnie Drew's THs are clearly THs. Not the soft English TH but not T or D.

There is a difference between a TH, pronounced with the tongue touching the back of the front teeth and a T or D, pronounced with the tongue touching the ridge of the mouth just behind the front teeth (the alveolar ridge).

Ronnie Drew is saying TH.

Listen more closely.

And 'Shardon'/Enya Martin is a caricature, laying it on very thick. Enya Martin's (aka Shardon) Youtube pieces are more natural but very much a minority accent even in Dublin.

Like this

o as in women (plural)

"(plural)" is redundant.

Hard 'th' as in 'the'. Although it is totally and utterly splitting hairs. In the grand scheme of a sentence, and depending how you talk naturally, both will sound absolutely fine!

Hard 'th' as in 'the'

But 'the' has a soft th...