Good grief how hard is it to pronounce "dese" "wurds" correctly?
BTW its three not tree.
Its spelt "three" but its pronounced "tree"
I heard in a pub someplace that in ancient Gaelic there was no letter 'h'. Instead a dot was used after the consonant to create the combination of the consonant +
h sound. It was for gender identity of nouns and for other grammatical conditions and tenses etc.
So '
th' was never a sound in Gaelic. The 't' would be silent if it preceded the 'dot' or, in modern times, the 'h'.
So when learning English words like '
the' a natural tendency for Gaelic speakers would be to silence the 't' and pronounce the word sounding like
[heh]'....this invariably would lead 60 lashings as the teacher would enforce the '
th' sound which is almost '
zzz' sounding if really slowed down to help with mouth, tongue and teeth correlation. This '
zzz' sound was even more alien to native speaker but not wanting to upset teacher again what emerged was '
te', eventually evolving to '
de', 'dere', and
'dat'.
*I have no idea if any of that is true other than it came after the fifth or sixth pint of Guinness flowing.