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Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

Merriam 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'.

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Seems a bit of a mish-mash. "Subtle" is definitely of latin origin, and most romance languages still pronounce the b - per the article, "debt" is actually in the same ballpark. "Island" however is of proto-germanic origins (ieg, iegland) and the coincidence with latin "insula" which later gave French "isle" and from there English "isle" is accidental.

[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).

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.

Interestingly, the first translation dictionaries I tried also showed me "sutil" (and only this form). I had to actually search for Portuguese language dictionaries to even see the form "subtil". Probably happens because Brazil has so many more Portuguese speakers than Portugal?

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...

https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-portuguese/subtle

> Probably happens because Brazil has so many more Portuguese speakers than Portugal?

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).

Turns out in Brazillian Portuguese the form "Sutil" is more common than "Subtil". In Portugal there's only "Subtil". So it didn't fail you exactly, and I was unaware of that difference.

They claim it's ultimately related to the latin debitum, but the b was lost before being reinserted by prescriptivists later. Not as bad as the s is island, which appears to be based on a false understanding of the etymology https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/island#note-1

They're not saying it's of no relation. They're saying something like, "once the language became English, the b was never heard".

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.

They're not saying that 'dette' is unrelated, they very clearly state that it comes from the latin 'debitum' from which the word debit also originates. But while debt descends from debitum, it is a different word. A word pronounced /dEt/ was in common use for centuries without ever having a b in it.

Merriam Webster are arch-descriptivists. As far as I can see, all lexicographers are descriptivists these days. As an incorrigible prescriptivist, this grieves me.

> But I have some doubts.

Did you mean “douBts”?

And since you used the word, how about the 'b' in 'doubt'?

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