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Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

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

#261

Post by rossitter »

sulam wrote: post #233
housecarpenter wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was with you until tortoise. US English speaker here, but I have literally never heard anyone say “tor-toys”. I think I’d have a serious moment if I did. Is there some link you can throw our way to demonstrate the point? YouTube?

I can say I have heard this from native speakers, but I can't pull up any YouTube links right now. I suspect I've heard it from people who don't always go by the spelling pronunciation, in the same way many people who insert a T sound into often don't always do so. (I include myself in the "variable often" group.)

For what it's worth the Oxford English Dictionary lists /ˈtɔːtɔɪs/ ("TAW-toice") and /'tɔːtɔɪz/ ("TAW-toiz") as alternate pronunciations in British English. This appears to be the result of a revision made to the entry sometime after 1989. (The public-facing revision history is not very precise.)

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

#262

Post by thaumasiotes »

OJFord wrote: post #109
thaumasiotes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> '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).

What did you mean?

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

#263

Post by canjobear »

DemocracyFTW wrote: post #258
kmm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

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…

German final devoicing is in no way an argument against phonemic theory. You're right that some experiments have shown that it is possible to phonetically distinguish the final consonants in Rad vs. Rat. However, all this means is that the phonemic /ra:d/ is spelled out into [ra:d̥] and /ra:t/ into [ra:t], where [d̥] indicates a lower voice onset time than [t]. It still remains the case that the pronunciation is fully determined by the phonemes, without reference to the spelling or other factors.

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

#264

Post by GavinMcG »

user-the-name wrote: post #239
b3orn wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like another case of the English version gaining a letter to be closer to Latin after borrowing it originally from French: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/address#English

Here's an interesting article about that: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/why-is-debt-sp...

Good lord

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

#265

Post by SilasX »

SilasX wrote: post #139
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What are the "new" pronunciations for these? I'm a native speaker and I'd pronounce them the way you've indicated is "older".

Yeah and my mom would even scold me, growing up, for pronouncing the t in often.

Follow-up shower thought: French kids must deal with that on steroids, since a) most terminal consonant letters are silent, and b) it's mandatory to contract to before a word that stars with a vowel sound. (Used as quotation markers just because the other options make it hard to parse.)

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

#266

Post by alisonkisk »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#268

Post by dwaltrip »

dgfitz wrote: post #267

Edit: Ignore me This can't be true. Anecdotal for sure, but everyone I know says: deb-it card instead of det card. I Live in the Baltimore-DC metro area. I can't be the only one with this experience.

What? The article is about the word “debt”, not “debit”.

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

#269

Post by fknorangesite »

Ancapistani wrote: post #259
xeromal wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that doesn't work, you can always whip out the "Bless your heart".

Or "special" - "You didn't miss Karen's special cookies, did ya?" That would usually be coupled with a very veiled reference to how she put in the minimum possible effort while indirectly insulting her entire bloodline: "Oh, don't you just feel for Karen? I don't know how she gets anything done with those kids of hers." Alternatively, if the speaker wants to embarrass her in front of someone with a higher social stan…

> "You didn't miss Karen's special cookies, did ya?"

Hah. Where I live this would mean they have marijuana in them.

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

#270

Post by CRConrad »

nyuszika7h wrote: post #82
dmurray wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In American English, unlike British English, œ and æ have mostly been collapsed into e. Compare encyclopaedia, foetus, faeces, diarrhoea, oestrogen. (But exceptions spelt the same way in both dialects: phoenix, oeconomics). If you'd like to encourage what you consider the correct pronunciation, I'd suggest favouring the spelling esthetic , which I do see but less commonly.

Perhaps interestingly, in some languages like German and Hungarian, (o)estrogen is written with just an ö and no e (Östrogen, ösztrögén).

That's probably because the dots on top are, historically, a vestige of the 'e'.
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