@article{oai:kumadai.repo.nii.ac.jp:02000148,
 author = {松瀬, 憲司 and Kenji, Matsuse},
 journal = {熊本大学教育学部紀要},
 month = {Dec},
 note = {The objective case of the third person plural pronoun, i.e., them often takes the form of 'em when it is pronounced as its weak/unstressed form in informal speech of Present-day Standard English (PSE). Here, however, what the apostrophe abbreviates is not the voiced dental fricative /ð/ sound which is spelled <th>, because this kind of sound-dropping does not seem phonetically relevant. As a matter of fact, this abbreviation is thought to be /h/-dropping of hem, which was the forerunner of them in PSE and used in Middle English; them was a loanword from Old Norse and not derived from the original native pronoun in Old English. Therefore we find that even now we are still using in our spoken language a revised version of the ancient third person plural pronoun. Then, does the word-initial /ð/ sound in English never drop in any environment? In reality, we can say that we do have some examples of that kind. One of such cases is assimilation of the /ð/ sound by the immediately preceding /n/ sound in the strings like in the or on the in informal speech; they sound like /innə/ or /ɔnnə/. Also we have some idioms like at last, etc. or interjections like attaboy, etc., and especially in the latter we are sure to find the phenomenon to be regarded as a pure kind of word-initial /ð/-dropping, because there is no sound at all before the dropped /ð/ sound of the expression.},
 pages = {75--81},
 title = {英語の語頭有声歯摩擦音/ð/ が消えるとき},
 volume = {72},
 year = {2023},
 yomi = {マツセ, ケンジ}
}