I just telling you why it’s easier, since you olaimed it’s not (with no argument or justification).
In regular speech the vowel in “the” is just rolled through as a transition into the M sound.
If you think the way you say it isn’t easier, then that’s cool, but you might want to consider the difference between fully enunciating each word and how people talk in regular speech.
I have never heard anyone fully elide the first vowel sound in “the morning” -it’s a schwa. The exception is Yorkshire accents which do so, and indeed, that shows you there is more to elide in “in the” than “at”.
“At m” is easier to say simply because it is fewer syllables - inserting more sounds rarely makes things easier to pronounce, and the fact that we say “at midday”, “at most” and “at many times” shows that there is no pressure to change these combinations of sounds.
But the whole thing is based on the faulty, unsupported premise that “in the” and “at” are in free variation. You can’t just start saying “in the midday” because it is ungrammatical, so if there were pressure to simplify “at most” we’d simplify its pronunciation (maybe to “ab most”) not swap preposition.
This is why I’m not giving more of a detailed argument about ease of pronunciation - because it’s not even relevant. That’s not how language picks prepositions. Like why do we say “I’m in the car” but “I’m on the bus”? I don’t know, but I suspect the answer lies in the history of the (Omni)bus, which used to often be open-topped, whereas the (motor)car was generally enclosed since its invention.
To find the answer in the case of morning and night requires tracing the etymology of the words and understanding the grammar used at the time they arose.
I just telling you why it’s easier, since you olaimed it’s not (with no argument or justification).
In regular speech the vowel in “the” is just rolled through as a transition into the M sound.
If you think the way you say it isn’t easier, then that’s cool, but you might want to consider the difference between fully enunciating each word and how people talk in regular speech.
I have never heard anyone fully elide the first vowel sound in “the morning” -it’s a schwa. The exception is Yorkshire accents which do so, and indeed, that shows you there is more to elide in “in the” than “at”.
“At m” is easier to say simply because it is fewer syllables - inserting more sounds rarely makes things easier to pronounce, and the fact that we say “at midday”, “at most” and “at many times” shows that there is no pressure to change these combinations of sounds.
But the whole thing is based on the faulty, unsupported premise that “in the” and “at” are in free variation. You can’t just start saying “in the midday” because it is ungrammatical, so if there were pressure to simplify “at most” we’d simplify its pronunciation (maybe to “ab most”) not swap preposition.
This is why I’m not giving more of a detailed argument about ease of pronunciation - because it’s not even relevant. That’s not how language picks prepositions. Like why do we say “I’m in the car” but “I’m on the bus”? I don’t know, but I suspect the answer lies in the history of the (Omni)bus, which used to often be open-topped, whereas the (motor)car was generally enclosed since its invention.
To find the answer in the case of morning and night requires tracing the etymology of the words and understanding the grammar used at the time they arose.