Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'
merriam-webster.com
merriam-webster.com
I work in old manuscripts, and this practice is very common. It's not surprising that an abbreviation in common use ended up becoming a word of its own. Mix in the French pronunciation, and the modern spelling and pronunciation is explained without any "meddling" needed.
It seems to.
English is sometimes closer to Latin than French, e.g. address ("ad" + "directiare") vs adresse in French
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.
The difference is that my lips touch and close when pronouncing "debt", while they stay entirely open if pronouncing "det" (e.g. in "determined"). The change of airflow imparts a soft "peh" before the "t", making the word sound like a softer form of "dept" rather than identical to "det".
I appreciate that spelling in english can be more historical than phonetic, and this might be a case of the tail wagging the dog.
As for debt versus determined. Those are both the same except the vowel is slightly different.
debt like head
vs determined like head or hit
But I couldn't even hear how to put a "puh" sound in the word
Determined has a long 'e' for me.
Dee-ter-mind (the 'i' is like 'in', not mind)
Note that the term 'long' here refers to the quality of the vowel and not the quantity.
The comment you're replying to describes it somewhat but since accents can drastically affect how we move our mouths during pronunciation I'll describe how I go about it. "det" by opening your lips slightly and pulling the corners of your mouth back, the tip of the tongue begins pressed against the gum line of your upper incisors, it is then pulled down quickly as you exhale, the jaw moves down slightly and your lips remain open but do not change shape.
"debt" by having the lips parted slightly but relaxed forming more of an "O" shape, the tongue is lightly pressed against the back of the top incisors but more flatly with more of the top of the tongue touching, as you exhale the tongue and lower jaw are pulled down but before you finish exhaling the lips are closed which truncates the sound softly. It's important to not close the lips too soon or too quickly otherwise you will wind up pronouncing "dept" with a sharp "puh". You're aiming for the very end of the exhalation and a soft closure to avoid any smacking sound.
The major difference seems to be that "det" is spoken from the back of the mouth whereas "debt" comes from the front. The former sounds more inline with a New England accent and the latter with an English accent.
A "b" sound is very distinct in English, involving a closing of the lips.
If "debt" were instead spelled "deht" (and pronounced exactly the same), readers would claim that they "pronounce the h".
This could probably be explained by having to actually move the muscles when opening the mouth in order to pronounce 'm'.
Since it does not significantly alter the meaning of the word if you briefly close or not close your lips (bilabial "preparation") before articulating the dental plosive "t" it is omitted in the "broad transcription". Another related example as a foreign speaker before articulating "psychology" I will form the unvoiced bilabial plosive "p" with my lips before executing "saɪˈkɑlədʒɪ".
It my sound stupid, but when I say "det" my lips tend to remain bit open, when I say "debt" the word ends with my lips closed ahaha
I doubt it makes any noticeable diference, and it's probably due to my native language influence.
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 word "debt" is in all dictionaries transcribed with three phonemes: /dɛt/. The set of phonemes in the English language is also limited and the consonants clearly demarcated, a hypothetical ghostly "b" phoneme would not go unnoticed.
I have no doubt that if we made a native English speaker pronounce a list of nonsense words and hid "det" in there, the spectrogram would be identical to that same speaker pronouncing "debt". And that said spectrogram would be nearly identical in the tail end to that of "set" or "net".
EDIT: † To be clear, spelling pronunciations do exist, but when they happen the actual phonemic content of the word is altered, e.g. the "l" in how some people say "salmon" is a full blown /l/, changing /ˈsæmən/ into /ˈsælmən/, not a subtle l-like sound.
I feel like the s sound is more drawn out with the <c> present.
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.
You describe the popular version of a linguistic theory, not established fact. There are facts corroborating it, and also some observations (such as the multitude of variations in basically unwritten dialects) that speak against this simple view (that I for one really want to be true, having invested years of my life into, but that doesn't make it any more valid).
An Achilles' heel of your argument is that it is generally very, very hard for people using a more-or-less phonetic writing system (such as an alphabet or a syllabary) to discuss speech sounds without referring to orthography, without mixing up speech sounds and written signs, and without hallucinating subtle differences (or their absence) in speech perception where there are differences (or the lack thereof) in the spelling.
As an example, take final obstruent devoicing as observed in Standard German[1]. The majority of the phonetic / phonological literature of the 20th c seems to leave no doubt that a final systematic -d- (as in 'Rad' [ra:t] (wheel; bicycle)) is phonetically indistinguishable from final systematic -t- (as in 'Rat' [ra:t] (counsel)). Yet there is a minority view (held among others by a well-respected language teacher of mine) who insist there is a minor auditory difference. We can test against that by presenting material that has been so cut and sliced as to erase the meaningful context of utterances and then ask people to vote for the one (Rad) or the other (Rat) based solely on auditory perception. This however is complicated by the fact that not all people speak pure standard high German (in fact—nobody does, of course), so what people do get to hear will always be a blend of dozens or thousands different dialects, idiolects, and mannerisms. Listeners are also faced with the task to accept that, depending on the speaker, 'Rad' may get uttered as [rat] (with a short [a], somewhat similar to En. 'rut'), and while the same may happen to 'Rat', that pronunciation seems to have a slightly differing geographical distribution than the short version of 'Rad'. So when I'm from Bremen, I will probably say 'Ich fahr mit dem [rat] zum [ra:t]haus' (I take the bike to city hall), whereas someone from Westphalia or Wuppertal may prefer short vowels in both words. The effect might well be that the listener's 'phonemes'—more generally, their internal systematic understanding of speech sounds—are much more tied to probabilistic aspects and the history of their personal experience than the clean, orderly phonological models presented in textbooks may lead one to believe.[2][3]
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverhärtung [2] see doubts about the reality of the phoneme expressed by BE Vidos Handbuch romanische Sprachwissenschaft https://www.amazon.de/Handbuch-romanischen-Sprachwissenschaf... [3] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47503 and a number of other threads on the reality of linguistic models
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.
I don't think most of the other posters here are claiming a "ghostly b phoneme", but a subtle vowel shift of /ɛ/ (which yes, does alter the phonemic content). In some dialects it sounds like some are describing an internalized "schwa-ification" rule of one sort of the other with the "b" in debt seen as most likely preventing a schwa /ə/ (or nearly such) in their dialect. In general in English /ə/ is the most common actual vowel sound in the majority of dialects, so many dialectal differences are the various rules in which vowels "drop" to /ə/ or not. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these ghost letters are indeed just relics of schwa-ification rules (which would indicate that with a possible spelling reform you'd still want to accent the vowel somehow that it is likely prevented from schwa such as rewriting "debt" to "dét").
(Aside: From this distance, the presumed Middle Age scholars' appeal to Latin to explain some of these deeply internalized schwa rules seems silly, but probably isn't far off the mark from a language evolutionary standpoint, at least for Old French borrowings in the language.)
How very fitting. I love life’s little ironies.
> 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
One of the first things you learn in linguistics is that people's judgments about their own pronunciation are not reliable at all.
Learned something new today =)
1. https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs?t=10 2. https://youtu.be/Ws22Nsg1lBI&t=10
This is probably related to the fact that "bad" and "bed" sound exactly the same to me.
The vowels are tougher, though. I didn't appreciate how many different vowels there are in English until I married a woman whose native language doesn't have most of them (Hebrew doesn't have the "a" in "bad", the "i" in "grin", nor a bunch of weird regional American "o" sounds)
https://www.wordreference.com/definition/bad
https://www.wordreference.com/definition/bed
(then yes, I guess it's coherent)
I can't hear the distinction between "pin" and "pen" unless I'm really paying attention. Even then I have to say it a dozen or so time before I can make myself say them distinctively. My birth accent is to pronounce them both mostly like "pin".
While I probably learned this in school, I apparently forgot and have been semi-pronouncing the b (not sure how to call it, it’s "semi-silent"?) for many years now.
I happen to know about "debt". But variants of it, like "indebted"? Who knows?
The poem _The Chaos_ ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw&t=12s ) is about this sort of thing, written by a Dutch teacher of English pronunciation.
(but even that mass of examples does not include debt, doubt or caveat)
Most people I know say verbage instead of verb-ia-ge like the dictionary sometimes recommends.
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.
My inner monologue still pronounces it incorrectly in some instances in text, as if there were two pronunciations that could apply depending on usage.
Come to think of it, there are many instances of this for me. I use "data" with a soft "a" when referring to the abstract concept of structured information, but "data" with a hard "a" ("date-uh") when referring to an instance of that concept (i.e., the data used to generate a chart).
You're implying that traditional, complex, and arbitrary pronounciations should be considered "smarter" than logical, simpler, and hence modern ones because...?
Pronounciation is a inherently classist concept; the harder you make it, the more you entrench classism and intolerance into society. Regardless of the motivation for such correspondents to use a modern form, I personally would applaud it as progress, rather than sneering at it.
"I personally would applaud it as progress"
One man's progress is another man's regress. Maybe it's the result of the "Hooked on Phonics" generation having grown up.
Yes, but I'm not a native speaker, so I have the privilege of seeing the matter from a more neutral perspective. And what I see, when it comes to pronounciations, is that traditionalism is largely illogical, and maintained simply as a way to signal exclusion. It looks harmless on some levels (i.e. figuring out whether somebody is "local" by the way they pronounce certain topological names), but more often than not it's just used to discriminate between education-rich and education-poor, which then translates into straightforward classism where educational systems are deeply and fundamentally classist (like in England or the US).
> Those would be more inclusive and modern pronunciations?
Yes.
> One man's progress is another man's regress.
For sure. After all, a few Catholics were ecstatic when pope Benedict XVI reinstated and promoted saying mass in Latin, effectively trying to revert a century of progress. But fighting actual and logical progress tends to be a losing proposition in the long run, and that particular movement kinda died off quickly.
What are the "new" pronunciations for these? I'm a native speaker and I'd pronounce them the way you've indicated is "older".
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.
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.
Yes, though some speakers use an S rather than a Z sound (think "choice").
I have only heard these pronunciations from British speakers.
I look forward to hearing that from Zoomer college students any time soon then.
Growing up somewhere with a strong accent (the Ozarks), I often find myself in the position of knowing exactly the right word to use in a situation, but having never heard it spoken aloud. I've always intended to learn how to use a phonetic alphabet (e.g., IPA) but haven't had an easy path to it.
I'm unsure of the difference between the old and new here. Does anyone pronounce the "l" in "falcon" by touching their tongue to the roof of their mouth?
I pronounce the "l" similarly in "fault", which is kind of "fau-t".
(If you're just referring to the "a" sound, like the a in "fall" vs "fat" then that's a different question, but I think quite regional.)
Hell, I'm pretty sure captain falcon in smash brothers also has a hard L in "falcon punch!"
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" :)
That would usually be coupled with a very veiled reference to how she put in the minimum possible effort while indirectly insulting her entire bloodline: "Oh, don't you just feel for Karen? I don't know how she gets anything done with those kids of hers."
Alternatively, if the speaker wants to embarrass her in front of someone with a higher social standing; "Karen, these cookies are just the best thing ever! What do you put in these to make them so good?"
Hah. Where I live this would mean they have marijuana in them.
I'm near the Missouri/Arkansas border, for what it's worth.
Both L sounds involve raising the tongue, but with the light L the tip of tongue approaches the alveolar ridge (the part of your gum just behind your top row of teeth), while with the dark L the tip of the tongue does the same thing, but the back of the tongue simultaneously rises towards the soft palate (this is called "velarization", and it's the same gesture that accompanies lip-rounding to form a W sound). There may be further differences depending on accent, e.g. in Cockney accents the tongue-tip gesture of dark L is lost completely so that dark L becomes a fully-fledged vowel, and it might even acquire lip-rounding and merge with W. Other accents have lost the distinction as well and generalized either light L or dark L to all positions (e.g. Scottish English tends to use dark L everywhere).
In the older pronunciation of "falcon", there's no L there at all, light or dark. It was borrowed from Old French "faucon", and the L was restored in spelling via Latin influence in more or less exactly the same way as the B in "debt".
For what it's worth the Oxford English Dictionary lists /ˈtɔːtɔɪs/ ("TAW-toice") and /'tɔːtɔɪz/ ("TAW-toiz") as alternate pronunciations in British English. This appears to be the result of a revision made to the entry sometime after 1989. (The public-facing revision history is not very precise.)
"Ae" is supposed to be one sound, like the vowel sound in "egg". The "a" is silent.
I'm terribly afraid everybody will learn the wrong way of saying it, and the correct way will go extinct.
Sorry for the off topic rant, but I had to try something to stop this asthetic epidemic.
Eh-stetic
Ah-stetic on the other hand is wrong, widespread and the reason of my crusade.
If you'd like to encourage what you consider the correct pronunciation, I'd suggest favouring the spelling esthetic, which I do see but less commonly.
Is that really so bad?
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'?
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.
And that’s on top of the fact that languages change over time and regional accents and dialects can pronounce words very differently.
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?
If a dictionary is in disagreement with native speakers, it is the dictionary that will change, not the other way around.
I don't understand what you're saying. Æ is a medieval innovation, a fancier way of writing the separate letters AE when they occur in sequence. It doesn't differ from a more modern fi ligature in that regard.
(It is a letter in its own right in Old English, but not here.)
> Secondly, æ pronunciation differs depending on etymology (here, Latin's borrowing from Greek).
And this doesn't look right either. Latin has AE where Greek has AI because that is how that vowel (the PRICE vowel in English) was spelled in Latin. Whether the word was borrowed into Latin from Greek or native to Latin makes no difference to the pronunciation.
As I mentioned above, Old English Æ is a different thing with a different pronunciation, but that's not really relevant here because Old English Æ never survives with the modern spelling AE. Compare þæt -> that / æfter -> after / æsc -> ash ......
What would be an example of the pronunciation of AE differing according to the etymology of the words?
In pronunciation, it shifts the A phoneme forward in the mouth closer to E.
The same thing happens with “ö”.
I've heard it pronounced two ways.
Ayegg.
Ehgg.
So I still don't know how you pronounce asthetic.
I pronounce it "ass-thet-ic".
... but I pronounce "aesthetician" as "ess-tha-tish-in".
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
If native speakers are pronouncing it a certain way, then that pronunciation is correct by definition.
Friends don't let friends be prescriptivists.
"Rare" can often be substituted by "seldom", but that doesn't work very well in restaurants. I like my steak medium-well anyway.
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.
Heh, this seems like the right thing to do when you think about it. Why should we keep track of some odd rules that only exist for historical reasons and aren't really... you know, written down?
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 bad accents but they speak freely. When a native speaker joins the room the other 5 suddenly say they can't keep up and native speaker doesn't know how to fix that. I'm not even generalizing - seen it in practice many times.
I find it very true in daily technical conversations with other companies, conferences and on any type of trainings (online courses as well). Non native speakers tend to get to the point more easily. It's easier for themselves. Then don't try to dazzle you with funny wordplay and jokes that make no sense outside of speakers country. It takes a lot of skill for a native speaker to be pleasant for foreigners.
To your point on vocab choice: if I use vocab not present/with different meaning in American English I would get blank stares so I often switch to the American term e.g. mobile phone vs cell phone. To your other point about local slang: I recently learned South Africans call traffic lights "robots", which I thought was fantastic.
But English speakers that I talked with (or listened to online) love actual wordplay. It's part of their culture. Tiny rhymes, replacing words with wrong ones that sound similar and "everyone knows what he meant".
Anything that you could comment as "pun intended" or "pun not intended" might be super hard to grasp for a foreigner. It often requires listener to know correct pronunciation and some phrasal verbs to get it and often knowing some facts from that country. I usually understand these things when said by Americans, but lack knowledge to understand similar "puns" by other nations. I know for a fact that most of my colleagues don't understand most of those. They might get that there was a joke there, but they won't know if it's commenting the topic positively or negatively.
Interesting. I've noticed this, but have always attributed it to being a product of the British education that most of them received, being from Commonwealth countries.
> It's easier for themselves.
It's also much more clear. I tend to code switch into a more precise dialect when in a professional setting. The words I choose are often a bit more specific, but they're not unnecessarily "fancy" - they're just precisely what I'm trying to convey. I also speak slightly more slowly, with a more regular cadence, and consciously enunciate sounds (especially consonants) that I would otherwise abbreviate or omit entirely.
> Then don't try to dazzle you with funny wordplay and jokes that make no sense outside of speakers country.
I actually enjoy hearing those, but not while communicating a complex and/or abstract idea.
> It takes a lot of skill for a native speaker to be pleasant for foreigners.
This makes me wonder if I'm more or less difficult to understand than my peers for non-native speakers. Given that I live somewhere with a strong and distinctive accent, I would assume I'm more difficult to understand but that it's partially offset by my "professional voice".
The next time I speak with a colleague who is not a native English speaker, I'll ask them.
On your accent I would not care much. You should not try to change your accent for others and you don't need to. Speak slower. That's a number one hint. If you can't force yourself to simplify your vocabulary just be consistent with it - it will soon be clear from context what it means. Also feel free to rephrase and summarize once in a while as it is a way of implementing both of those hints.
A lot of courses on Coursera, Pluralsight or similar platforms utilize that consistently (Udemy is a mess of different approaches). Default speakers speed is super low, vocabulary is super consistent within a course. Course is painfully summarizing every few minutes, at the start of a chapter, end of it, every few chapters. I've seen complains about that, but it I think such repetition works.
I asked "cloud you please speak a bit slower" a few times when I was talking on the phone in US (calling a store, library, etc.) and people seldom complied. But that's a huge aid yet I ignored it until a pilot of a small, loud plane on my trip asked my party to "speak slower so we can understand each other". Communication was over headsets and apparently it's simply good practice regardless of the language.
On your vocabulary - "us Foreigners" may have learned English from same books or Cartoon Network shows. We often have issues with same vocabulary. You in one paragraph used:
convey, enunciate, consonants - I had to pause at those. I've been thought what a consonant is 25 years ago but used it maybe 10 times since then. My fault entirely, but still. Enunciate is completely new to me. Convey I figured out from context, I knew it only from context of "conveying a survey".
"professional setting", cadence, abbreviate - such use of "setting" would be understood by more advanced speakers, in my opinion. Others might treat "setting" as an option to tweak in yaml file. Cadence I know as it's a "bicycle thing", but I don't think all of my colleagues would grasp that at first read.
Abbreviate and omit - are one of those things I'm sure we were told in school about, but is used less often one might think. It should be clear if used consistently in a larger text.
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'?
Now you make me wonder if English speakers ever pronounce dept. literally.
Not often, but "dept" if sometimes used as a short form of "department" in written form, and I've heard people pronounce it literally before. It certainly can be pronounced distinctly from both "debt" and "depth" by native english speakers.
Yes, like that. Definitely not with a vowel. There's really no way to know for a non native speaker that the b is supposed to be silent, except by learning about it as a special case.
'pth' is different because the same stream of air can be used for both consonants, with the tongue contacting the teeth just as the lips open, so any gap between the consonants is not perceived to native listeners.
It'll probably sound like an accent to you, but then there are a thousand different native speaker accents, so that is OK with me.
For what it's worth, "bt" is not a common combination in my native Romanian either, but it is not hard to pronounce.
It can be done with lots of practice but native speakers don’t normally do this.
Aye, we natives sometimes do. ;)
My morning pedantry complete, I shall stand aside while the next greater pedant corrects this comment. Let the games begin!
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'.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/island
Edit: note about debt though - in most Romance langauges today, there is no b: French dette, Spanish deuda, Romanian datorie, Catalan deute; Portuguese and Italian do seem to use debito, with the b, though. The situation is similar with subtle: we have "subtil" in French, Romanian and Catalan; but sutilo in Spanish and Portuguese, sottile in Italian.
We should also note that Romance langauges tend to prefer phonetic spellings to etymological ones, with French being something of an outlier. Even there, the extra letters that are written are typically still relevant in declinations/conjugations, such as in mauvais (masculine, silent s), mauvaise (feminine, se pronounced like z).
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.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-portugue...
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-portugu...
These two do mention it, but as the "secondary" form:
https://www.linguee.com/english-portuguese/search?source=aut...
Definitely. Similar to how most websites (even European ones) use American English instead of British English.
Interestingly, Portuguese children are adopting a lot of Brazilian Portuguese words now because of Youtube (since Brazilian content is so much more common than Portuguese content).
This isn't a circular argument or glossing over "what does it mean to be English", because while the line is blurry between Old French and Old English following the Norman invasion of Britain, there's no such link between English and Latin.
Did you mean “douBts”?
Yes, I can confirm [1] that Finns often struggle with 'b'. An IME very common example: The word "pub" for a drinking establishment has been loaned as-is into Finnish. But the expression "Let's go to the pub" is, I think more often than not, rendered as "Mennään buppiin".
As I understand it, this is because Finns can pronounce the letter 'b' (even though it isn't natively used in the Finnish language), but for many (most?) it takes quite a bit of concentration and leads to some amount of nervous tension. So when you see one coming -- i.e. having just decided that you're going to say "pub" -- you prepare, tense up... And release it too early, at the start of the word (no wonder, since it starts with the treacherously similar letter 'p'). Then, having blown all your tense preparation already (and perhaps just jumbling it up with the other consonant you also had prepared to pronounce), the end of the word comes out as the (again, treacherously similar) letter 'p'.
No biggie, but definitely still a little funny. (At least to me. Sorry.)
___
[1]: Foreigner, but since last spring lived longer (26 years) in Finland than in any other country.
'S' for example is always pronounced like the English 'sh' if it's next to 'e' or 'i', and like a regular English 's' if it's next to 'a', 'o' or 'u'.
There was an Eoghan, though.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/10/30/episode-153-z...
So I'm unsure what you mean by "My 'Th' comes from 'thorn', not 'th'". The digraph "th" simply underwent a shift in Old English to spelling it with Þ, and then shifted back to "th".
(On a related note, though, it's always funny when "Ye olde shoppe" is pronounced differently that "the old shop." The "y" is simply a version of the thorn Þ, which was pronounced "th", and the ending "e"s were not pronounced.)
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 better to keep the b, if just for clearer etymology?
Anybody who imagines English pronunciation should match spelling can't possibly know much of anything about English.
Let's not get started on how many British pronounce "drawing".
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.
Oh, I'm quite sure it does. :-)
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 accent!
I enjoy regional pronunciations. I don't want them ruled to be somehow incorrect. But I deplore incorrect usage, such as "literally" to mean figuratively. M-W says that figuratively is a correct usage of literally, even though it means the exact opposite.
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.
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".
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'.
Huh? None of this makes any sense.
English has far more vowels than letters. 'ee' is an old digraph that always afaik means long-e, and ett(e) is a french borrowing that will always indicate short-e. 'deat' would work for long-e, too, probably, although 'ea' is much squirrelier (turns into a couple of diphthongs.)
For one thing, the evolution of the pronunciation isn't going to take the spelling into account unless the word gets a lot rarer.
But even if it did, there's only one way you could pronounce "det". It would rhyme with bet, get[1], jet, let, met, net, pet, set, vet, wet, and yet. The spelling is fully unambiguous. This is the paradigm context for distinguishing "long vowels" from "short vowels" - det must be short just as dete must be long. You could no more indicate a "long E" with "det" than you could indicate a "long A" with "mat" or a "long I" with "hit".
> although 'ea' is much squirrelier (turns into a couple of diphthongs.)
What? What diphthongs? As far as I can think of, the closest you get to a diphthong with -ea- is as in "near", which is still just /i/ plus whatever you get as you reposition your tongue.
[1] "get" is such a common word that its pronunciation has evolved in some nonstandard dialects. But of course it hasn't moved to the FLEECE vowel; it's moved to KIT.
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.
debt, doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island
In true confusing English fashion, "indite" still exists, with a different meaning from "indict".
"Received Pronunciation" (roughly, BBC English) is full of all kinds of historical mispronunciations that have become standard, often as a result of the upper classes adopting some working-class tic as a fashion. Dropping the aitch from "historical" would be an example; it was a cockney habit, adopted by posh people. It's mostly faded among folk that talk proper nowadays (at least in England; aitch-dropping seems to have survived among some groups in the US). But a lot of what's considered standard pronunciation derives from horrible mispronunciations by posh people.
[Edit] "An hotel" (with the aitch sounded) is simply incorrect; You only use "an" if you're going to drop the aitch.
My mother once heard the following sound, brayed loudly in the quad at St. John's College, Oxford: "Eh-oh, heeliaw meekyeh!" (Oh, hello Mickey). That strangled accent was common among the huntin/shootin/fishin crowd.
There was a fellow from the BBC Pronunciation Unit on the radio a couple of weeks ago, explaining (in a jokey way, as if to say it's a fuss about nothing) that "omicron" can be pronounced several ways, and that the unit had chosen OM-ee-cron. I did a term of classical greek at school; the first thing we learned was the alphabet, and we were taught to pronounce it oh-MY-cron. Classicist Mary Beard says it's oh-ME-cron, but I suspect she's inferring the way it might have been pronounced in Ancient Greece.
Boris Johnson is a classicist; I'm sure he was taught to pronounce it the same way I was. But he's using the BBC version, at least in public.
Anyhow, my confidence in the BBC Pronunciation Unit has gone down several notches this winter.
I'll need to check this. If the word came from Old French or any post-Latin Romance language, then the "h" would almost certainly be silent. The "h"s in Vulgar Latin were all silent except among educated speakers.
Pronouncing the "h" in "historical" or "hotel" is almost certainly originally a spelling pronunciation. It may have started out as a hypercorrection, just like pronouncing the "h" in "vehicle" when it should really be "vee-icle".
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/02/h-dropping.html
That's an interesting article, and apparently the hhistory of dropped aitches is much more complicated than I suggested. But I don't entirely agree with it. It says it's correct to use the indefinite article before a noun starting with an aspirated aitch; I don't know anybody that talks like that, and it sounds awfully pompous.
(On the one hand it's a very common word, so someone learning English as a foreign language might have been taught the "correct" pronunciation. On the other hand, it's something that many native speakers of English, particularly younger and less well educated speakers, get "wrong" so teaching the "correct" pronunciation may be assigned a lower priority. Also, for all I know, perhaps the "t" should be pronounced in some dialects of English; I only know standard British English.)
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.
Part of the problem there is that English has enough regional accents that we're all exposed to on a day-to-day basis that if you're understandable most people won't realize you're pronouncing something "wrong" instead of "differently".
⸻⸻⸻
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).
I'm confused. Which letter is silent in "plumber"?
Other examples: dumb, tomb, comb, womb, numb, thumb, catacomb, Coulomb. All of these have a silent B.
And to be fair, I am aware New England English is its own distinct thing so I might have grown up in a bubble:
Another one I, as a non native speaker, find odd, is "iron". People just say it as "ion", dropping the 'r', right?? At least that's what I hear.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/iron
Yeah, but the Brits make up for that by stuffing a lot of extraneous 'r's in between other words.
(TBF, that's a kind of sensible simplification of pronunciation: it's used when one word ends and the next starts with a wovel, to ease the transition.)
I was taught it's pronounced "plummer". So, the 'b'.
So much so I've decided I should start journaling about it. New Year's Resolution style decided, aka aspirational.
Not just the usual dialect stuff, like British vs American variations for aluminum. But easy to miss stuff like which syllable gets emphasis, hard vs soft 'ch', and so forth.
I mention it here in hopes someone with more gumption and education (about pronunciation) starts a compilation.
here's a fun one: juice VS jews. As a non-native speaker, I am not sure these are prounounced differently enough you can confidently say which one is being said when there's no context to guess it... I guess "jews" just gets a longer vowel?
Ex: He's not lying.
1. He's not lying. (Someone else is lying)
2. He's not lying. (Same as original but more forceful)
3. He's not lying. (Depending on context, could mean "He's not technically lying, but perhaps I'll agree he's stretching the truth a little.", or it could mean "OMG c'mon this is Jim we're talking about, he's not LYING...are you crazy? He always tells the truth."
I wonder how many court transcript readings have totally screwed someone over because of something like this. Add sarcasm to the mix to take it up a notch.
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
As example when saying "debt" I will close my mouth entirely at some point, even though it shouldn't be necessary.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...
And I distinctly pronounce the “b” in “plumber” (another example in the article.
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 be the product of busybody typesetters, imagining some parallel with "should" and "would" (related to "shall" and "will"), which also do not get any "l" sound; but "could" is related to "can".
In some times and places it becomes normal.
> Often has a medial /t/ that, like similar words such has "hasten" and "soften," was once pronounced and is now typically silent.
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 typically before vowels and h-, probably by influence of its opposite, seldom (Middle English selden).
( https://www.etymonline.com/word/often )
> From Middle English often, alteration (with final -n added due to analogy with Middle English selden (“seldom”)) of Middle English ofte, oft, from Old English oft (“oft; often”)
( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/often )
Where did you get the idea that they weren't related?
You just said they weren't...?
same, I woulnd't pronounce "debt" the same way I would pronounce "dette" in French, and likewise for "doubt", which would turn in French "doute" ...
The English t is also aspirated a lot of the time (though not as consistently at the end of a word as at the beginning), while the French t is never aspirated.
There could be differences between the two short e sounds as well, but that depends more on which particular accents of English/French you're talking about.
(Fortunately, Shavian with "det" has solved for the meddling of linguistic hacks. Mostly.)
Anyway maybe I shall start to pronounce, I think it sounds fine as debt instead of det.
Our hour writes the right mnemonic sandwich.
- Debt is the amount owed, often with interest charged.
- Debit is a negative entry on a balance sheet.
This can't be true. Anecdotal for sure, but everyone I know says: deb-it card instead of det card. I Live in the Baltimore-DC metro area.
I can't be the only one with this experience.