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.
Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
271–280 of 338 posts
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#272Oh 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…
To me it sounds a lot like the German "ä", which can also be written as "ae". I wonder if this is somehow related.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#273Oh 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…
If native speakers are pronouncing it a certain way, then that pronunciation is correct by definition.
Friends don't let friends be prescriptivists.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#274Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#275> 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"?
I had the same question :D from other comments, it seems a bit controversial, no? Another one I, as a non native speaker, find odd, is "iron". People just say it as "ion", dropping the 'r', right?? At least that's what I hear.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#276Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#277This topic was just recently discussed in what is probably my favorite non-engineering podcast, the History of English Podcast: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/10/30/episode-153-z...
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#278Edit: 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.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google translate must have failed me here... It claims "sutil".
> Google translate must have failed me here And there's your mistake: don't use Google translate for single words. Use a dictionary for that - it'll tell you that both variants exist and even denotes that "sutil" is the Brazilian one :) Single words don't carry enough context for statistics-based approaches like Google translate and even then, Google translate is not even very good compared to alternatives like deepl…
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-portugue...
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-portugu...
These two do mention it, but as the "secondary" form:
https://www.linguee.com/english-portuguese/search?source=aut...