During this morning's hypnopompia, I heard someone singing the chorus of the Weezer song "All My Favorite Songs," except that the key words sad, mad, and bad were pronounced differently. Instead of ending in a hard /d/, they ended in /ð/, the voiced interdental fricative, one of the two "th" sounds of English.
This turns out to be matheningly hard to render in intuitively understandable pronunciation spelling. The problem is that in English, final th is voiced only after long vowels (as in lathe, breathe, writhe, loathe, smooth). After short vowels, final th is voiceless (as in path, death, smith, moth, doth). The only exception of which I am aware is (for some speakers) with. I personally pronounce it to rhyme with smith, but pronouncing it like the first syllable of wither is also considered standard. So to convey the singer's strange pronunciation, I need some way of indicating either that the th is voiced where you would expect it to be voiceless (bath but with a voiced th), or else that the a is short where you would expect it to be long (bathe but with a short a). Since the distinction between long and short vowels is much more familiar to the layman than that between voiced and voiceless fricatives (a surprising number of native English speakers aren't even aware that the language has two distinct "th" sounds), I opted for the latter:
All my favorite songs are slow and sătheAll my favorite people make me mătheEverything that feels so good is băthe, băthe, bătheAll my favorite songs are slow and sătheI don't know what's wrong with meI don't know what's wrong with me
Here's the original song. Be advised that it may be a bit earwormy.
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