[edit]This was a failed attempt at humor, sorry.[/edit]
Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
151–160 of 338 posts
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#152[edit]This was a failed attempt at humor, sorry.[/edit]
Could that be the word "debit", as in ATM debit card?
- Debt is the amount owed, often with interest charged.
- Debit is a negative entry on a balance sheet.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#153I 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 i…
I'm from New England. I pronounce both det and debt exactly the same.
As for debt versus determined. Those are both the same except the vowel is slightly different.
debt like head
vs determined like head or hit
But I couldn't even hear how to put a "puh" sound in the word
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#154My favorite example is when two types clash. For example number and number. One meaning to be more numb and the other meaning numeric digits.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#155[edit]This was a failed attempt at humor, sorry.[/edit]
[deleted]
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's impossible in English though; 'b' is pronounced as a plosive, blowing through the lips as they open, while 't' is produced by tapping the tongue on the palate with lips open. So there is an interval between the 'p' and 't' which must be occupied by a vowel, typically a schwa.
'pth' is different because the same stream of air can be used for both consonants, with the tongue contacting the teeth just as the lips open, so any gap between the consonants is not perceived to native listeners.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#157I 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.
It's very interesting people think so, and I've heard similar statements about the in "scent".
Yet linguistically, it really doesn't hold up. Words are built up from phonemes, which undergo some alterations depending on their order and the context to become the phones (as in sounds, not telephones) which are actually pronounced. But this allophonic variation is never dependent on the spelling of the word†, and the word "debt" is in all dictionaries transcribed with three phonemes: /dɛt/. The set of phonemes in the English language is also limited and the consonants clearly demarcated, a hypothetical ghostly "b" phoneme would not go unnoticed.
I have no doubt that if we made a native English speaker pronounce a list of nonsense words and hid "det" in there, the spectrogram would be identical to that same speaker pronouncing "debt". And that said spectrogram would be nearly identical in the tail end to that of "set" or "net".
EDIT: † To be clear, spelling pronunciations do exist, but when they happen the actual phonemic content of the word is altered, e.g. the "l" in how some people say "salmon" is a full blown /l/, changing /ˈsæmən/ into /ˈsælmən/, not a subtle l-like sound.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that correct?
"Correct" is an under-specified term when discussing english pronunciation. "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 f…
> Dropping the aitch from "historical" would be an example; it was a cockney habit, adopted by posh people
I'll need to check this. If the word came from Old French or any post-Latin Romance language, then the "h" would almost certainly be silent. The "h"s in Vulgar Latin were all silent except among educated speakers.
Pronouncing the "h" in "historical" or "hotel" is almost certainly originally a spelling pronunciation. It may have started out as a hypercorrection, just like pronouncing the "h" in "vehicle" when it should really be "vee-icle".
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Consider reading the article discussed for correct info. Wiktionary does not even claim what you just did.
> From Middle English dette, dett, borrowed from Old French dete
It seems to.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you don’t pronounce the “t” in “often”, how do you pronounce “oft”?
what kind of hoighty-toighty high-falutin podcast-producer uses the word "oft" in spoken english?