The Thanks People

I realize that this post might be tricky. It's all because of the sorry state of English orthography. We have different sounds referred to (by weirdos) as interdental fricatives. These are sounds made with the tip of the tongue between the teeth: the th sounds. Wait. Sounds? We have more than one of these interdental fricatives? Sure we do: a voiced and a voiceless interdental fricative. Just like we have two labiodental fricatives, for instance (sounds made with the upper teeth against the lower lip)—that is, v and f—we have two th sounds. The problem is that we have only one way of writing those two sounds. We don't even have single letters for those sounds. We're forced to use ungainly combinations of letters. But we used to be able to write them with ease. Say hello to the edh and the thorn.

ð This is edh. It represented the voiced interdental fricative (the first sound in therefore).

þ This is thorn. It represented the voiceless interdental fricative (the first sound in theory).

If we only still used the edh and the thorn, this post would be smooth sailing, and I'd be able to explain my next superinteresting point more easily.

The voiceless sound (the thorn) is found (among other places) at the beginning of nouns (thistle, thumb, thalamus), verbs (think, throw, thump), and adjectives (thin, thorough, thermal). (These sounds don't come only at the beginnings of words—see athlete, filthy, and myth.)

But—typically—the voiced one (the edh) is found in pronouns of all kinds (they, them, this) and more strictly functional words (though, there, and the).

Still not sure you hear the difference? Just compare thigh (which starts with a voiceless th) to thy (which differs from it only by that voiced th).

The first group is sometimes called open-class words, and the second is sometimes called closed-class words. Open-class words are far more numerous and new members are brought in all the time. When new words are borrowed from other languages or coined from scratch, which happens all the time, they're usually nouns, verbs, or adjectives. New conjunctions, articles, or pronouns don't take root very often. 

I have noticed that some people pronounce the word thanks with a voiced (and not a voiceless) interdental fricative That is, they're saying it with an edh. Not only is this just, well... strange, but it's also bucking the tide when it comes to the way English likes to use these two sounds. Thanks is an open-class word, and finding an edh at the beginning of an open-class word is highly unusual. So the edh-thankers are really blazing a trail. The edh-thankers I've encountered haven't shared any obvious trait: they have been of different ages, genders, and regions. It's like watching a new genetic mutation cropping up. Will it spread? Is it dangerous? (Does it have any connection to the distinction between edh-with—picture the word with pronounced like the beginning of the word wither—and thorn-with?)

Full disclosure: I am a thorn-with person. I say with with a voiceless interdental. But the edh-with people... They're out there. Watching. Waiting.