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Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

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

#161

Post by gamerDude »

jdavis703 wrote: post #125
libertine wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m a native English speaker and I can feel there’s a slightly different muscle I’m using to pronounce debt vs det. It certainly feels physiologically different to pronounce it. But then, I actually can’t really here any aural difference.

Also native English speaker. I find the I am breathing out on the e in debt but not det. So it gives a slightly longer and softer e. But hardly noticable and I thought I would say it the same before analyzing my words.

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

#162

Post by mcprwklzpq »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #84
islon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non native speaker here. I always pronounced the b in debt and in doubt. Learned something new today =)

Could you show phonetically how it sounds when you say those words? Im struggling to imagine what pronouncing the b would sound like

Imagine skipping i in debit. Or just say deb - it will be close. I always pronounced it somewhat like this. [1] The worst thing is that i had heard the word pronounced by native speakers hundreds of times and did not notice. Now i am not even sure that b is there in [1]. Here is another example that certainly has b[2].

1. https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs?t=10 2. https://youtu.be/Ws22Nsg1lBI&t=10

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

#163

Post by pessimizer »

julesnp wrote: post #141
pornel wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Polish speaker, I have no problem pronouncing debt. Depth is debt-hhhh for me :) Now you make me wonder if English speakers ever pronounce de p t. literally.

We do in a different word: adept :)

This got me there by saying 'adebt' over and over again. Thanks.

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

#164

Post by Scarblac »

scatters wrote: post #156
Scarblac wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ah, but I'm a non-native speaker, I am not constrained by what is possible for native speakers. I suspect my 'b' is quite close to 'p' (but it's not exactly the same).

It'll probably sound like an accent to you, but then there are a thousand different native speaker accents, so that is OK with me.

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

#165

Post by merpnderp »

quitit wrote: post #110
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 i…

I just spoke both words several times paying attention to my lips and seemed to have the same response as you. The b in debt does distinctly change the sound of the word for me. Maybe a better example is I don't open my mouth as much for debt as I do for met.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

ghc wrote: post #131
housecarpenter wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, what? None of those have a silent B, at least in my region. Are there places that pronounce the same as womb as "woom"?

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by sumtechguy »

1_player wrote: post #45
kreeben wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my ears it's the most beautiful when you replace "ae" with the "e" sound from "meh". Eh-stetic

It's not just a matter of beautiful, it is correct. Ah-stetic on the other hand is wrong, widespread and the reason of my crusade.

Many words are spelt the way they were pronounced when the word was invented. However, that becomes interesting when you have hundreds of regional dialects and accents, mash it through 2 different languages and 500+ years since the spelling was set down. Take for example the word resume. Without the tick mark it means to restart something. Yet it can also mean your work history with and without the tick mark now. That is because it is a pain to type that word out with the tick mark. So the spelling of the word is changing yet pronounced in 2 wildly different ways. You have found one of those 'transition' words. Where it is changing but the spelling has not caught up yet. This comes up from the fact that the current alphabet has 26 letters yet there are at least 40+ phonemes. This weirdness comes up when 'english' borrows a word from another language that has one of those 'others'. The alphabet just does not really cover all of them in all cases. So oddities happen, and accents happen so you get weird bits like that. We paper over it with smashing together letters. But again because of accents that does not always work well.

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

#169

Post by kmm »

ghc wrote: post #131
housecarpenter wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, what? None of those have a silent B, at least in my region. Are there places that pronounce the same as womb as "woom"?

Can I ask what region you live in? Pronouncing as /wuːm/ is the dominant pronunciation in every English speaking country, so much so that I can't recall ever hearing it differently, and I'm surprised you've never heard it. It's not a recent change either, the /b/ disappeared somewhere before the 14th century.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

williamdclt wrote: post #150
kgeist wrote: post #62

Early French grammarians had the idea to make spelling more etymological to show continuity with Latin, another example which comes to mind is Old French "deit/doit" which became "doigt" in Middle French because Latin had -g- in "digitus".

As you'd expect, the g and the t are both silent

[deleted]
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