I do this too - "thee actual" vs "thuh real" and such. I do expect it's to do with having a vowel sound of a certain kind at the beginning of the next work making you move your tongue in a certain way.

People taught me the a/an rule based on the vowel, but never taught me about this, probably because at school, the emphasis is on grading on the written language.

I just noticed that I do this change in pronunciation without even (and ever) noticing it, which is how I like to approach learning these rules, by pure exposure.

I grew up in New England.

My experience is that "thuh" is basically a lazy / informal pronunciation of that word.

But it's also by far the most common pronunciation. "Thee" would sound strangely hyper-formal, at least in my circles.

Edit: the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770609) also rings true to me.

It's similar to a/an, thuh is before a consonant and thee is before a vowel. And thee is also used for emphasis. But some people use a / thuh before a vowel. Do you have an example?

I learned English as a second language and was taught it was thee before vowel sounds and thuh before consonants. Is it wrong?

The official rule I learnt in my English (as foreign language) classes is vowel = thee and consonant = thuh. That's it.

But I noticed that native speakers deviate from this at least in two cases:

1. Use thee to emphasize the following noun

2. When searching for the noun to say, they often get it wrong because they say something like "uh, thee, thee, thee, uh, book" and never sweat it.

Source: I watched a lot of Monty Python as a kid and John Cleese does this all the time.

This is governed by the following word. "Thee" can also be used for emphasis anywhere.

> However, only some vowels

Pretty sure it’s all vowels isn’t it?

“Thee”: apple, evening, island, offer, underpass

“Thus”: any other words where you don’t need to avoid a glottal stop to differentiate the word.

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