Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

merriam-webster.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 338 posts

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

#241

Post by odiroot »

Scarblac wrote: post #88
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.

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?

How about that "pneumatic", "queue" and "Worcestershire" ;)

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

#242

Post by tsimionescu »

denton-scratch wrote: post #90
robbedpeter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawring lol. That r just magically appears after ahh or ohh, and almost everyone is shocked when you point it out.

"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 someone said "I was so embarrassed I died", this is still a figurative use, just less emphassised. The addition of "literally" is not there to clarify that they don't mean real death, as it would imply if "literally means figuratively" was what was happening.

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

#243

Post by tdeck »

yeldarb wrote: post #140
kerneloftruth wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that in the past few years I encounter more people (native English speakers) who intentionally pronounce the T in often. I notice that several are NPR correspondents, which makes me think some are saying it to "sound smart". It's funny, really.

If you don’t pronounce the “t” in “often”, how do you pronounce “oft”?

If you don't pronounce the "t" in "listen", how do you pronounce "list"?

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

#244

Post by amanaplanacanal »

1_player wrote: post #68
OJFord wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple, for starters 'the a is silent' isn't really right, because it's just a modern rendering of æ, there is no 'a' (or 'e') really. Secondly, æ pronunciation differs depending on etymology (here, Latin's borrowing from Greek). Thirdly, the (ancient) Greek pronunciation changed over time anyway. So how far back do you want to go for 'original' and 'correct'?

> So how far back do you want to go for 'original' and 'correct'? As far back as the pronunciation guide from modern English dictionaries. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aesthetic Yours is a nitpick over the nature of æ that doesn't invalidate my point that most people mispronounce that word.

Well... dictionaries are attempting to document actual English usage, so if most people pronounce it differently I would suggest the dictionary is wrong, not the people pronouncing it differently.

And that’s on top of the fact that languages change over time and regional accents and dialects can pronounce words very differently.

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

#245

Post by ed312 »

szszrk wrote: post #49
timonoko wrote: post #3

Nobody in some nobodyland. Majority in the world would. It is safer to pronounce English as it written and just modify on well-known cases. Especially when two non-natives speak two each other. "Fancy" pronunciation can make things impossible, as only native speakers can understand where you are aiming at.

This is true to the bone. It's hilarious how many native speakers ignore this - even knowingly. It also goes beyond pronunciation into local slang and choice of vocabulary. In my experience "Native Speakers" often don't understand each other correctly (of course random ones, from different parts of world) - plenty of tiny misunderstandings due to the tempo of conversation. 5 random non-native speakers may have all ba…

For strictly technical communication you make a great point - we probably should try to work with a "standardized" or "international" English. That said, something about your comment struck me as deeply sad: the "funny wordplay" injects some personality and novelty into communication. I don't want to live in a world where we communicate in a strict manner for utilitarian purposes only (including at work).

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

#247

Post by odiroot »

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."

"Albeit" was the one for me. After 20 years of speaking the language, I realised it's not "all bite" but "ahl-bee-eet".

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

#248

Post by mdavidn »

Scarblac wrote: post #88
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.

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?

A running joke in my family is my intentional mispronunciation of "subsequent" as "sub-see-quent" (similar to "sequence").

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

#249

Post by jkingsbery »

> Some scholars in those dark days we refer to as the Middle Ages sure did.

According to [1], more precisely the word came into English around 1300. According to [2], Petrarch coined the term "Dark Ages," a term that many historians now reject because the Middle Ages were not dark, around 1330. Whether the claim by this article about how "b" made its way into debt is true, I don't know. But the claim that the "b" was added in "the dark days" obfuscates that it happened around 30 years before the birth of the idea of the Middle Ages as a dark time, and after the Renaissance started in some parts of Europe [3].

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=debt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

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

#250

Post by xeromal »

Ancapistani wrote: post #226
xeromal wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard l in my pronunciation of falcon. FAL-CON. I'm from Appalachia though so we tend to have drawn out pronunciations of everything. lol Hell, I'm pretty sure captain falcon in smash brothers also has a hard L in "falcon punch!"

Ozarkian here - we have names where additional syllables are added when we're annoyed with the person. It's "Karen" in normal conversation, but if she brought storebought cookies to the potluck it's "Kar-in-nuh", with the emphasis on the last syllanble. In my head, these are called "spite syllables" :)

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