Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://voca.ro/17YDT0eVw4Jh
Isn't that correct?
Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
61–70 of 338 posts
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#62Early French grammarians had the idea to make spelling more etymological to show continuity with Latin, another example which comes to mind is Old French "deit/doit" which became "doigt" in Middle French because Latin had -g- in "digitus".
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#63Oh 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…
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'?
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#64Nobody 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.
Pronouncing the 'b' in debt is just about impossible for anyone with an intelligible English accent. You have to shove a vowel in there which would likely result in 'debit', a different but related word that could create potential subtle and disastrous misunderstandings. Even if it were non-native speaker saying 'debit' when they meant 'debt' to another non-native speaker.
Maybe it'd be better to spell it 'degt'. Those consonants almost work smashed together, and 'deggit' or 'decked' would be confusing enough to get clarified.
edit: maybe people pronounce it like 'depth' with the 'th' replaced with a 't'?
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#65As 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 that that I'm unable to generate the proper sounds, but I just never learned the correct pronunciation. Nobody ever corrected me until recently.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#66English is not my first language so I wouldn't presume I know more than people at Merriam Webster - but that sounds iffy to me. Sure, I don't say deb-t, but isn't the b still there as a plosive / stop? If it were just spelt "det" I feel like it'd have a more prominent t sound. It also seems strange to say it would have been better to get rid of it when we definitely need the b in "debit" and "debenture", isn't it bet…
> If it were just spelt "det" I feel like it'd have a more prominent t sound.
If it were just spelled 'det' the vowel would start jumping around. You'd have to go 'dett' or even 'dette' in order to avoid 'deet'.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#67Merriam Webster is blaming old school prescriptivists? But I have some doubts. You have the closely related word 'debit' in several languages where you do pronounce the 'b'. I'm surprised they're saying that old english 'dette' is of no relation, but ok then. In the case of 'subtle', the dutch cognate 'subtiel' definitely does pronounce the 'b'.
And since you used the word, how about the 'b' in 'doubt'?
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#68Oh 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…
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.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minor correction: it's also "subtil" in Portuguese.
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.com.
Re: Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://voca.ro/17YDT0eVw4Jh
Isn't that correct?
The correct (or at least, American English) pronunciation is "indite" (see https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/indict for an audio file). The -c- is completely silent.
In true confusing English fashion, "indite" still exists, with a different meaning from "indict".