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Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

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Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#101

Post by Scarblac »

pessimizer wrote: post #64
timonoko wrote: post #3

Nobody in some nobodyland. Majority in the world would. It is safer to pronounce English as it written and just modify on well-known cases. Especially when two non-natives speak two each other. "Fancy" pronunciation can make things impossible, as only native speakers can understand where you are aiming at.

Pronouncing the 'b' in debt is just about impossible for anyone with an intelligible English accent. You have to shove a vowel in there which would likely result in 'debit', a different but related word that could create potential subtle and disastrous misunderstandings. Even if it were non-native speaker saying 'debit' when they meant 'debt' to another non-native speaker. Maybe it'd be better to spell it 'degt'. Tho…

> edit: maybe people pronounce it like 'depth' with the 'th' replaced with a 't'?

Yes, like that. Definitely not with a vowel. There's really no way to know for a non native speaker that the b is supposed to be silent, except by learning about it as a special case.

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#102

Post by housecarpenter »

laurent123456 wrote: post #18

English is spoken by more non-native speakers than native, and often they pronounce those letters since they don't know about it. With that in mind, I wonder if the language will eventually evolve to a point where the "b" of "debt" and other silent letters are no longer considered silent.

It's happened again and again with other words. "often" (older pronunciation: "offen"), "Anthony" (older pronunciation: "Antony") and "tortoise" (older pronunciation: "tortuss") are examples where the spelling pronunciation still hasn't totally won out. Words where the spelling pronunciation has reached fixation include "falcon" (older pronunciation: "fawken"), "reptile" (older pronunciation: "reptil"), "sphere" (older pronunciation: "spear"), "bankrupt" (older pronunciation: "bankrout"), "baptism" (older pronunciation: "baptime"), and "perfect" (older pronunciation: "parfit").

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#103

Post by fileeditview »

1_player wrote: post #15

Oh this is the place where I can finally rant about _aesthetic_, the favourite word for most music/art/movie content creators I've watched in the 2020s, one everybody mispronounces and reads it as "asthetic" which annoys me to no end, because it is totally WRONG. And I keep hearing it daily, which is maddening. "Ae" is supposed to be one sound, like the vowel sound in "egg". The "a" is silent. I'm terribly afraid eve…

To me it sounds a lot like the German "ä", which can also be written as "ae". I wonder if this is somehow related.

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#104

Post by Scarblac »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #98
Scarblac wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard thing is that I read English the whole day, I don't often listen to it. And pronunciation is really unpredictable -- I once lost a bet because I couldn't believe that "finite" and "infinite" were pronounced so differently. I happen to know about "debt". But variants of it, like "indebted"? Who knows?

Wait until you hear someone say 'caveat'.

Good point, I really have no clue what that sounds like.

The poem _The Chaos_ ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw&t=12s ) is about this sort of thing, written by a Dutch teacher of English pronunciation.

(but even that mass of examples does not include debt, doubt or caveat)

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#105

Post by codingdave »

timonoko wrote: post #3

Nobody in some nobodyland. Majority in the world would. It is safer to pronounce English as it written and just modify on well-known cases. Especially when two non-natives speak two each other. "Fancy" pronunciation can make things impossible, as only native speakers can understand where you are aiming at.

As a native speaker, that is an interesting take on it and one I had not considered before, so thanks for pointing it out. It meshes well with my overall attitude when I see incorrect English - to accept people wherever their language skills may fall. After all, even us natives make mistakes. As long as we can understand each other, perfect language is irrelevant.

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#106

Post by thaumasiotes »

ncmncm wrote: post #4
garmaine wrote: post #2

Ummm… I do. It’s not a hard b sound, but it is there. It sort of moves the location of the “t” sound down towards a “b.” It defiantly does not sound like “det”. And I distinctly pronounce the “b” in “plumber” (another example in the article.

We all have our faults. But we don't need to promote them. There is also no "t" sound in "often", never was. Some officious busybody thought "offen" and "oft" ought to be related. so put "often" in a dictionary. Now people who don't know any better pronounce it. But it's rare to find anybody trying, foolishly, to say the "b" in debt and doubt. I doubt anybody tries to pronounce the "l" in "could". That one appears to…

> There is also no "t" sound in "often", never was. Some officious busybody thought "offen" and "oft" ought to be related. so put "often" in a dictionary. Now people who don't know any better pronounce it.

Hmm? The etymology dictionaries don't appear to back you up on this.

> often (adv.): "repeatedly, again and again, many times, under many circumstances," mid-13c., an extended form of oft, in Middle English typically before vowels and h-, probably by influence of its opposite, seldom (Middle English selden).

( https://www.etymonline.com/word/often )

> From Middle English often, alteration (with final -n added due to analogy with Middle English selden (“seldom”)) of Middle English ofte, oft, from Old English oft (“oft; often”)

( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/often )

Where did you get the idea that they weren't related?

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#107

Post by deberon »

jtsiskin wrote: post #81

I may be crazy but I feel the ghostly presence of the “b”. For instance say “let let let let det” Now say “let let let let debt” Train a neural net on a few million samples of native English speakers reading these, and I think it could predict which prompt was read with >50% accuracy, even if each person was only shown one of the prompts.

I don't know if you're crazy, but I just said "let let det" about a dozen times to myself in my office ;)

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#108

Post by inciampati »

frutiger wrote: post #78
eozoon wrote: post #6

English is not my first language so I wouldn't presume I know more than people at Merriam Webster - but that sounds iffy to me. Sure, I don't say deb-t, but isn't the b still there as a plosive / stop? If it were just spelt "det" I feel like it'd have a more prominent t sound. It also seems strange to say it would have been better to get rid of it when we definitely need the b in "debit" and "debenture", isn't it bet…

> If it were just spelt "det" I feel like it'd have a more prominent t sound. In other examples, the prominent “t” sounds and the vowel seems to vary based on emphasis. Compare: 1. Marriage? We only just met yesterday! 2. I’m not really sure, I think I met him four or five years ago.

How are these different? What is changing?

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#109

Post by OJFord »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #80
OJFord wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple, for starters 'the a is silent' isn't really right, because it's just a modern rendering of æ, there is no 'a' (or 'e') really. Secondly, æ pronunciation differs depending on etymology (here, Latin's borrowing from Greek). Thirdly, the (ancient) Greek pronunciation changed over time anyway. So how far back do you want to go for 'original' and 'correct'?

> 'the a is silent' isn't really right, because it's just a modern rendering of æ, there is no 'a' (or 'e') really. I don't understand what you're saying. Æ is a medieval innovation, a fancier way of writing the separate letters AE when they occur in sequence. It doesn't differ from a more modern fi ligature in that regard. (It is a letter in its own right in Old English, but not here.) > Secondly, æ pronunciation di…

On your second point, I didn't mean that it was different in Latin than Greek, just that that's the etymology of the word being discussed here (and I only mentioned Latin since otherwise it's not really helpful because it's obviously an entirely different alphabet).

Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

#110

Post by quitit »

jtsiskin wrote: post #81

I may be crazy but I feel the ghostly presence of the “b”. For instance say “let let let let det” Now say “let let let let debt” Train a neural net on a few million samples of native English speakers reading these, and I think it could predict which prompt was read with >50% accuracy, even if each person was only shown one of the prompts.

Maybe some accents don't pronounce the b at all, but its presence definitely affects how I pronounce the word, I'm sure I'm not alone in this either.

The difference is that my lips touch and close when pronouncing "debt", while they stay entirely open if pronouncing "det" (e.g. in "determined"). The change of airflow imparts a soft "peh" before the "t", making the word sound like a softer form of "dept" rather than identical to "det".

I appreciate that spelling in english can be more historical than phonetic, and this might be a case of the tail wagging the dog.

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