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Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

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

#321

Post by WorldMaker »

Koshkin wrote: post #313
xeromal wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding scent, I definitely notice a difference in my Appalachian brain. I feel like the s sound is more drawn out with the present.

I wonder if this might be a mental artifact of being aware of the spelling. Kids probably would hear no difference between 'scent', 'cent', or 'sent'.

Thinking about it from my dialect, I do think there is a stronger voicing on the "s" in "scent" and "cent" but not the "s" in "sent" (might even be as distinct as /s/ versus /z/? But probably with a partial-voiced marker on one or the other?). Also, I think "cent" is the only one where the vowel seems always forced, not schwa-ed /ə/.

It's not always the case, but there can be a reason to believe that spelling differences may have arisen in such cases from trying to explain subtle distinctions that mattered to someone's dialect before a lot of the modern work went into the IPA and actually capturing those subtle differences.

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

#322

Post by falcolas »

Koshkin wrote: post #311
falcolas wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Midwest, same pronunciation of debt/det. Determined has a long 'e' for me. Dee-ter-mind (the 'i' is like 'in', not mind)

> a long 'e' Note that the term 'long' here refers to the quality of the vowel and not the quantity.

Correct, yes.

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

#323

Post by anticensor »

yodsanklai wrote: post #65
dorianmariefr wrote: post #37

As a non-native english speaker (french), I was pronouncing those words wrong I guess: debt, doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island

I don't know what could have been done differently in my English learning journey, but it's quite odd that I'm still unable to pronounce extremely simple words, even after living years in the US and the UK. There are many simple words that I only recently learned to pronounce correctly. For instance, "write" is pronounced as "right", and "vegetable" is not pronounced as "table". In these particular cases, it's not th…

Vegetable the noun is pronounced with /'-əbl/ and vegetable the adjective is pronounced with /-'eibl/.

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

#324

Post by chadlavi »

rossitter wrote: post #257
toyg wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be a posh RP speaker ;-) The way I hear them here in the North (of England), from most common folks, is Of-Ten, An-th-ony (with TH from "the"), and Tor-Toy-s. The T in "often" can be very short but it's definitely there.

> An-th-ony (with TH from "the") Out of curiosity, is it definitely the voiced TH from "the," rather than the unvoiced TH from "thing?" In the US the spelling pronunciation of Anthony is by far the more common (at least in my experience), but I've never heard it with a voiced TH.

I think they must have meant the unvoiced "th" from "thing" not the voiced "th from "the". I've only ever heard "Anþony". I can't imagine any native English speaker saying "Anðony" unless they're drunk or otherwise slurring their speech significantly.

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

#325

Post by Koshkin »

WorldMaker wrote: post #321
Koshkin wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this might be a mental artifact of being aware of the spelling. Kids probably would hear no difference between 'scent', 'cent', or 'sent'.

Thinking about it from my dialect, I do think there is a stronger voicing on the "s" in "scent" and "cent" but not the "s" in "sent" (might even be as distinct as /s/ versus /z/? But probably with a partial-voiced marker on one or the other?). Also, I think "cent" is the only one where the vowel seems always forced, not schwa-ed /ə/. It's not always the case, but there can be a reason to believe that spelling differe…

Yes, being able to make a clear distinction is important, and subtle variations in pronunciation, whether officially recognized or not, do help. That's why, in particular, people tend to say "fur" instead of "for" - in order (my guess) to avoid confusing it with "four" (which is expected to appear more often in everyday speech than "fur" and "fir").

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

#326

Post by Mountain_Skies »

feintruled wrote: post #196
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…

Always found it odd how in older books, names were so often abbreviated. William becomes Wm. or Edward to Edwd. for example. Seemed a strange practice as they were no stranger to verbosity in other respects.

Jas. being an abbreviated form of James used to be common but certainly isn't a relationship I would have guessed between the two.

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

#327

Post by ncmncm »

tsimionescu wrote: post #242
denton-scratch wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Droring" seems to me to be regional in British English. I hear it more in the North and in London. As a child, I had elocution lessons from a scouser in Liverpool. She insisted on pronouncing the word "with" as "hwith", with the "th" hardened as in "thought", rather than softened as in "the". As a consequence I misspelled "with" for many years. Try to avoid taking elocution lessons from someone with a non-standard a…

Figuratively, literally can mean figuratively, even though literally it means literally. But joke aside, literally is basically a figure of speech used for emphasis - it seems strange to me to say it means figuratively. If I hear someone say "I was so embarrassed I literally died", to me that transmits emphasis, which is different from both the proper sense of "literally" and the proper sense of "figuratively". If so…

Linguists call this usage a "generic intensifier", where whole meaning is stripped away and just means "more".

They circulate in and out of fashion as they grow tired. Recently we had "exponentially", correctly meaningful only to describe a series of numbers growing at rate out of all proportion, or sometimes decaying. Lately we have "incredibly", correctly meaning "unbelievably", which has somehow attained greater and longer currency than usual, used even in constructions like "incredibly honest". "Unbelievably" had its day. We have had "deeply", "madly", many others. Ancient ones include "very", which has almost entirely lost its original meaning of "truly", which has itself been a generic intensifier, and been weakened.

Any adjective or adverb may completely flip meaning by ironic use, and sometimes back again, such as "terrific", which once meant close to "horrific". "Plausible", literally "believable", meant in the early 20th century more frequently "unbelievable" or "unlikely". In living memory, "likely" meant "unlikely", as in "a likely story".

The extremum of ironic usage is "yeah, right".

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

#328

Post by ncmncm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #106
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 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. Hmm? The etymology dictionaries don't appear to back you up on this. > often (adv.): "repeatedly, again and again, many times, under many circumstances," mid-13c., an extended form of oft , in Middle English typica…

The words are obviously related. But that doesn't mean one came from the other.

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

#329

Post by ncmncm »

toxik wrote: post #57
szszrk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which in exchange makes you easier to understand in most of the world. I have this with "rare" - such a problematic word for a slavic person and even if you nail it, non-native speakers may not get you. So it's better to actually say it with your mother tongue accent. "Rare" can often be substituted by "seldom", but that doesn't work very well in restaurants. I like my steak medium-well anyway.

"I would like my stake medium seldom, please." I have a hard time with the word "ineligible" - easy to read and write, but I just cannot say it without stumbling. No particular part of the word is hard either, it just... comes out wrong. I think it may be unusual way you turn it into syllables: in-el-i-gi-ble.

My grandfather, who grew up in Santa Rosa, California, could not say "monogamous".

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

#330

Post by jhanschoo »

housecarpenter wrote: post #102
laurent123456 wrote: post #18

English is spoken by more non-native speakers than native, and often they pronounce those letters since they don't know about it. With that in mind, I wonder if the language will eventually evolve to a point where the "b" of "debt" and other silent letters are no longer considered silent.

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 think Anthony is a natural English development; Latin has Antonius and french has Antoine. Affricatization is a common process
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