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Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

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

#281

Post by ncmncm »

boondaburrah wrote: post #19
ncmncm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all have our faults. But we don't need to promote them. There is also no "t" sound in "often", never was. Some officious busybody thought "offen" and "oft" ought to be related. so put "often" in a dictionary. Now people who don't know any better pronounce it. But it's rare to find anybody trying, foolishly, to say the "b" in debt and doubt. I doubt anybody tries to pronounce the "l" in "could". That one appears to…

There very much is a 't' sound in 'often,' but it depends on how you talk (whether or not there was before, language changes). If you're saying native speakers are saying it wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.

Linguists call it "spelling pronunciation": pronouncing as written, pedantically, despite not hearing it spoken that way. It's silly, but less silly than many other things. Of course, the more it happens, the more other people hear it that way and come to believe it is normal.

In some times and places it becomes normal.

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

#283

Post by jcal93 »

nicoburns wrote: post #130
Scarblac wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I was quite a prolific reader as a child, and this caught me out with a quite a few words even as a native english speaker. My favourite instance being "awry"(pronounced a-wry). I was aware of and understood the word a-wry (having heard it on the radio), but I thought there was also a word "awry" pronounced aw-ry. I was in my twenties before I connected that these were the same word.

I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one who did this kind of thing as a child. For me it was "archive" which I was pronouncing "ar-chiff" as opposed to "ar-kive". Took a while to break that habit.

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

#284

Post by throwaway8451 »

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?

Here is an example by the singer / band "Marina and the Diamonds". The song is called "Forget":

https://youtu.be/17UL5ks9amY?t=169

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

#285

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

robofanatic wrote: post #96

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…

I know a friend with that name, Sean. He works in consumer service dept and he is the only Sean/Shawn/Shaun in there, everyone knows they are asking for him. Usually his coworker will transfer the call to him and say "Give me a moment, I will transfer you to Sean, as in Sean Connery, who will handle this". It also help a lot when doing intake over the phone. If there are name are that so much similarities, it is best to use the reference of the name to help them.

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

#286

Post by jacobolus »

billbrown wrote: post #224
nicoburns wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was quite a prolific reader as a child, and this caught me out with a quite a few words even as a native english speaker. My favourite instance being "awry"(pronounced a-wry). I was aware of and understood the word a-wry (having heard it on the radio), but I thought there was also a word "awry" pronounced aw-ry. I was in my twenties before I connected that these were the same word.

Mine was "hitherto." I was quite deep into my 30s before I found out it wasn't pronounced "hit-hurt-oh."

> hitherto

I’m sorry we don’t still have more use of hither, thither, whither, hence, thence, whence, hereby, thereby, whereby, herefore, therefore, wherefore, hereto, thereto, whereto, herefrom, therefrom, wherefrom, hereafter, thereafter, whereafter, herewith, therewith, wherewith, herein, therein, wherein, hereupon, thereupon, whereupon, etc.

They are fun words.

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

#287

Post by the_greyd »

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?

As someone from India, "tor-toys" is what you would hear from most Indians. For most words of the kind, in india they would be pronounced in exactly the way that would make you remember the spelling of the word (since you are graded on that). I would bet that's the case with most non native speakers.

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

#288

Post by Tagbert »

fileeditview wrote: post #103
1_player wrote: post #15

Oh 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.

The umlaut (dots) represent a vestigial “e”.

In pronunciation, it shifts the A phoneme forward in the mouth closer to E.

The same thing happens with “ö”.

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

#289

Post by dhosek »

As someone who developed large swathes of his vocabulary from reading, I've been prone to mispronunciations of some of my more recondite vocabulary.¹ I can remember learning that indict was the same word as the "indite"² I'd hear on the news.³

⸻⸻⸻

1. To say nothing of the gross confusion in my inner voice when I'm reading the Vulgate text of the Bible where the words come out in a gross amalgam of classical and ecclesiastical Latin.

2. It doesn't help that there's an actual word "indite" which is a homophone of "indict" with a different meaning.

3. I was home on winter break from college and was rather proud of a paper I'd written with "indicting" in the title when my dad asked me how the word was pronounced and I checked the dictionary. My dad was also the one who taught me that the t in often is silent (although since that day in the 1970s, dictionaries have become less prescriptive in their pronunciation guides and they now give the pronunciation with and without a silent t).

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

#290

Post by mekal »

odiroot wrote: post #255
mekal wrote: post #221

I still remember when I met a guy from Germany about 20 years ago...he spoke decent-enough English and I don't remember the context but somehow he started going on about the word "debt" and refused to believe the b was silent lol. In my opinion, "colonel" is even more confusing.

Wonder if he'd get a hart attack if you mentioned lieutenant as well.

"German man dies of heart attack during heated debate over article about former Lieutenant Colonel Joaquin Phoenix."
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