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> 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"?
Other examples: dumb, tomb, comb, womb, numb, thumb, catacomb, Coulomb. All of these have a silent B.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/10/30/episode-153-z...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://voca.ro/17YDT0eVw4Jh
Isn't that correct?
"Received Pronunciation" (roughly, BBC English) is full of all kinds of historical mispronunciations that have become standard, often as a result of the upper classes adopting some working-class tic as a fashion. Dropping the aitch from "historical" would be an example; it was a cockney habit, adopted by posh people. It's mostly faded among folk that talk proper nowadays (at least in England; aitch-dropping seems to have survived among some groups in the US). But a lot of what's considered standard pronunciation derives from horrible mispronunciations by posh people.
[Edit] "An hotel" (with the aitch sounded) is simply incorrect; You only use "an" if you're going to drop the aitch.
My mother once heard the following sound, brayed loudly in the quad at St. John's College, Oxford: "Eh-oh, heeliaw meekyeh!" (Oh, hello Mickey). That strangled accent was common among the huntin/shootin/fishin crowd.
There was a fellow from the BBC Pronunciation Unit on the radio a couple of weeks ago, explaining (in a jokey way, as if to say it's a fuss about nothing) that "omicron" can be pronounced several ways, and that the unit had chosen OM-ee-cron. I did a term of classical greek at school; the first thing we learned was the alphabet, and we were taught to pronounce it oh-MY-cron. Classicist Mary Beard says it's oh-ME-cron, but I suspect she's inferring the way it might have been pronounced in Ancient Greece.
Boris Johnson is a classicist; I'm sure he was taught to pronounce it the same way I was. But he's using the BBC version, at least in public.
Anyhow, my confidence in the BBC Pronunciation Unit has gone down several notches this winter.
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No, there is nothing there at all. If you look on a sonograph, "debt" and "det" sound exactly identical. Anybody who imagines English pronunciation should match spelling can't possibly know much of anything about English. Let's not get started on how many British pronounce "drawing".
Drawring lol. That r just magically appears after ahh or ohh, and almost everyone is shocked when you point it out.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drawring lol. That r just magically appears after ahh or ohh, and almost everyone is shocked when you point it out.
"Droring" seems to me to be regional in British English. I hear it more in the North and in London. As a child, I had elocution lessons from a scouser in Liverpool. She insisted on pronouncing the word "with" as "hwith", with the "th" hardened as in "thought", rather than softened as in "the". As a consequence I misspelled "with" for many years. Try to avoid taking elocution lessons from someone with a non-standard a…
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…
What are the "new" pronunciations for these? I'm a native speaker and I'd pronounce them the way you've indicated is "older".
Non-native speaker here. True story: this was long time ago when we used to work in offices and people actually used to sit in tall cubicles with names printed on it. I was the new guy and needed some help from IT so I walked up to the cubicle of the IT guy called Sean and said "Hey Seen, how is it going". There was like 30 seconds of silence and he said "it's Shawn, whats up" and then followed a very awkward convers…
> 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"?
English doesn't tolerate word-final -mb. It's always pronounced as -m, and the -b isn't pronounced when a suffix is added either. Other examples: dumb, tomb, comb, womb, numb, thumb, catacomb, Coulomb. All of these have a silent B.
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.
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?