[yeahforsureman]

Yeah, accents, dialects, preserving history and mutual intelligibility by retaining old or original forms of spelling or otherwise... Lots of reasons for being conservative here.

What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.

EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.

[ben_w]

No worries :)

Other than the specific location and the social category of "upper-middle-class", I don't know how to describe my accent. People at school thought I was posh, but I never saw myself that way.

Now I live in Berlin, so I might have started picking up a bit of a German accent (and perhaps an ESL accent if there is such a thing).