Thanks for this info, Wlodek. I really enjoy having a peek in other languages.....hmmm....in Polish not sooo close. ;) It is interesting and very challenging!
Maybe you can pronounce this word for us in the next session?
My first thought was, as ...
>Please listen to the first female speaker in this youtube video on SLEBlog. What do you think about the pronounciation of that lady?
Non-native :-)
For the strong/emphatic forms of articles she's using in the recording... Well, it's a long story. In our session I mentioned two functions of this in communication: grammatical and emphatic. But this is just a biginning of the full explanation. The third function, which comes out very clearly is ... let's call it pragmatic. Briefly: in slow and thoughtful speech, with lots of hesitations and breaks, using the long/emphatic/strong forms of function words is almost automatic: slow speech requires phonetically full forms, and these are: /Di:/ for "the" and /ei/ for "a". We can talk more about this, if you want, in our next session...