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Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

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

#301

Post by asiachick »

kmm wrote: post #157
jtsiskin wrote: post #81

I may be crazy but I feel the ghostly presence of the “b”. For instance say “let let let let det” Now say “let let let let debt” Train a neural net on a few million samples of native English speakers reading these, and I think it could predict which prompt was read with >50% accuracy, even if each person was only shown one of the prompts.

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…

Reminds me of Japanese. I'm probably going to get the technical terms wrong but every Japanese sound ends in a vowel except 'n'. If you ask a Japanese person how to say a word they will pronounce every vowel but if you listen to them say the word in actual usage they often drop many of the vowels.

If you ask them about it most of them think they are saying the vowel because in their mind, since they've been taught that way their entire life, there is always a vowel. But record them and process the phonemes out and they are dropping it 99% of the time.

The most common examples are "desu" and "suki". You can find examples of people saying "de-su" and "su-ki" but most of the time they just say "des" and "ski".

It's a problem for foreign language students because the teacher will tell them it's "de-su" and "su-ki" and then the student will say "de-su" and "su-ki" and not sound remotely like a native.

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

#302

Post by ncpa-cpl »

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

Wow, I didn't know about "indict"! I think it's one of those words I have read or listened but never had to pronounce.

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

#303

Post by jacobolus »

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.

That dictionary documents es-, is-, and ēs- as common pronunciations (perhaps IPA vowels ɛ, ɪ, and iː), with the 'es-' form (short e sound) most common in the USA (this is the one I generally hear people use, with a vowel sound somewhere between IPA ɛ, e, ə, æ sounds and short enough that identifying the precise vowel can be tricky) and the ēs- form (long e sound) most common in the UK. Having multiple accepted pronunciations is different from “most people mispronounce this”.

I don’t really understand what you are criticizing. Maybe you can put up an audio recording including what you consider the “correct” and “incorrect” pronunciations to be?

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

#304

Post by tsimionescu »

Tagbert wrote: post #300
tsimionescu wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you pronounce "kept" then?

I think _scatters_ meant “bt” that combination is difficult to produce without introducing an additional vowel. The “pt” is easier.

It's possible, but strange, since b is simply the voiced form of p - you just need to vibrate your vocal cords for a moment longer when pronouncing "kebt" (since they were already vibrating to pronounce the vowel), compared to pronouncing kept.

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

#305

Post by CRConrad »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #33
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.

It varies. My pronunciation of drawing definitely does not include an r . Perhaps it has changed over the last 65 years of my life. Or it is a regional pronunciation. I suspect that more young people include the r .

> My pronunciation of drawing definitely does not include an r.

Oh, I'm quite sure it does. :-)

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

#306

Post by tsimionescu »

Tagbert wrote: post #297
tsimionescu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native English speakers can pronounce the unvoiced version in "kept", is it really hard to replace the voiceless 'p' with a voiced 'b'? For what it's worth, "bt" is not a common combination in my native Romanian either, but it is not hard to pronounce.

Yes, it is harder to handle the transition of voiced B to unvoiced T than it is to handle the transition from unvoiced P to unvoiced T. If you try to voice the B, you will likely end up with a voiced D at the end “Debd”. It can be done with lots of practice but native speakers don’t normally do this.

That's a bit strange, since the vowel is already voiced, but I do believe you - it just goes to show how complex our vocal apparatus and systems of pronunciation are.

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

#308

Post by CRConrad »

inciampati wrote: post #108
frutiger wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it were just spelt "det" I feel like it'd have a more prominent t sound. In other examples, the prominent “t” sounds and the vowel seems to vary based on emphasis. Compare: 1. Marriage? We only just met yesterday! 2. I’m not really sure, I think I met him four or five years ago.

How are these different? What is changing?

The word "met" is first more, then less emphasised. As I understood the GP's point, it was that the more "explosive" emphasis on the whole word also changes the quality of the final 't' to a harder plosive than the relatively softer one in the sentence that is more about exactly when it was.

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

#309

Post by anonAndOn »

chmod775 wrote: post #251
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…

The correct way to pronounce something is always the way people do it. Language is defined by its speakers, not some committee or your preference.

Mon dieu! Don't tell the Académie Française!

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise

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