Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt' • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by rahimnathwani » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

Scarblac wrote: post #104

rahimnathwani wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I had a colleague (very smart guy, with excellent written English) who didn't believe me when I told him caveat was not pronounced the same as 'cave at'.

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

#112

Post by libertine » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

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'm not a native english speaker, though I think I'm fluent speaking it... all of this to say that despite the sound being very similar, my lips movement differs between "det" and "debt":

It my sound stupid, but when I say "det" my lips tend to remain bit open, when I say "debt" the word ends with my lips closed ahaha

I doubt it makes any noticeable diference, and it's probably due to my native language influence.

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

#113

Post by housecarpenter » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

pm215 wrote: post #35

wazari972 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native French speaker here, same, I woulnd't pronounce "debt" the same way I would pronounce "dette" in French, and likewise for "doubt", which would turn in French "doute" ...

The difference between 'doubt' and 'doute' is the vowel sound, not a presence/absence of 'b'. 'debt' and 'dette' don't sound quite identical to me (as a native English speaker and learner of French) but they're very close and the difference isn't that there's a 'b' sound in there. Maybe it's that French 't' is slightly different.

French t is dental, English t is alveolar---in non-technical language, that means the French t is pronounced slightly further forward in your mouth, compared to the English t.

The English t is also aspirated a lot of the time (though not as consistently at the end of a word as at the beginning), while the French t is never aspirated.

There could be differences between the two short e sounds as well, but that depends more on which particular accents of English/French you're talking about.

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

#114

Post by mfontani » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

> English has not managed to shed its own. The language suffers similarly (and for the same reason) with the silent letters in doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island.

I'm confused. Which letter is silent in "plumber"?

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

#115

Post by ahartmetz » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

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.

When you first try to teach someone pronunciation of your language, you may think about that kind of thing for the first time. "The tongue needs to be further forward", "the stress is on the other syllable", "that sound is between a and e", "there's a sort of tiny break here" etc. Much of it you can't even see in phonetic spelling.

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

#116

Post by cbowal » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

mfontani wrote: post #114

> English has not managed to shed its own. The language suffers similarly (and for the same reason) with the silent letters in doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island. I'm confused. Which letter is silent in "plumber"?

The "b"

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

#117

Post by bruce343434 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #63

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…

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'?

It should at least be consistent with "ae[eh]rodynamic".

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

#118

Post by kerneloftruth » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

housecarpenter wrote: post #102

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" (old…

I find that in the past few years I encounter more people (native English speakers) who intentionally pronounce the T in often. I notice that several are NPR correspondents, which makes me think some are saying it to "sound smart". It's funny, really.

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

#119

Post by senkora » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

teilo wrote: post #87

What M-W attributes to "lexical meddlers" is almost certainly the result of the very common practice of borrowing latin words, and, when the word is in common use, abbreviating it. Originally the latin word would have always been pronounced "debitum" when read, even if abbreviated "debt." So the b certainly was pronounced. It just wasn't English to begin with. I work in old manuscripts, and this practice is very comm…

Debt was borrowed into English from Old French, where it had already lost the b, rather than from Latin.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/debt

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

#120

Post by saalweachter » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #65

dorianmariefr wrote: post #37

As a non-native english speaker (french), I was pronouncing those words wrong I guess: debt, doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island

I don't know what could have been done differently in my English learning journey, but it's quite odd that I'm still unable to pronounce extremely simple words, even after living years in the US and the UK. There are many simple words that I only recently learned to pronounce correctly. For instance, "write" is pronounced as "right", and "vegetable" is not pronounced as "table". In these particular cases, it's not th…

> Nobody ever corrected me until recently.

Part of the problem there is that English has enough regional accents that we're all exposed to on a day-to-day basis that if you're understandable most people won't realize you're pronouncing something "wrong" instead of "differently".