What M-W attributes to "lexical meddlers" is almost certainly the result of the very common practice of borrowing latin words, and, when the word is in common use, abbreviating it. Originally the latin word would have always been pronounced "debitum" when read, even if abbreviated "debt." So the b certainly was pronounced. It just wasn't English to begin with.
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.
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but it seems that both the link in the comment you replied to and the article in the post itself specifically say that debt is derived from French, where it lacked a b.
Sure, but the comment said it was borrowed into English from Old French, which was accurate. The point of the comment was that the borrowing wasn't directly from Latin (with a b) but indirectly from Old French (without a b). No one was claiming Latin was uninvolved.
Always found it odd how in older books, names were so often abbreviated. William becomes Wm. or Edward to Edwd. for example. Seemed a strange practice as they were no stranger to verbosity in other respects.
We definitely know that there are lots of words that came to English via French that had already lost their b, and had the b added back in a foolish attempt to standardize English spelling.
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.
Maybe some accents don't pronounce the b at all, but its presence definitely affects how I pronounce the word, I'm sure I'm not alone in this either.
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.
> But I couldn't even hear how to put a "puh" sound in the word
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.
I'm also from New England and pronounce it differently, note that the difference is outrageously slight... "debt" is ever-so slightly longer than "det"... best I can place it is that "debt" is pronounced further back in my mouth and "det" is more toothy.
In phonology you can account for that level of detail with "narrow transcription" it is often helped by recording the sound or even MRI[0] (sagittal section)
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".
I just spoke both words several times paying attention to my lips and seemed to have the same response as you. The b in debt does distinctly change the sound of the word for me. Maybe a better example is I don't open my mouth as much for debt as I do for met.
It's very interesting people think so, and I've heard similar statements about the <c> 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 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.
The consonants in English are clearly demarcated, but not the vowels, and especially not between dialects.
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.)
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.
Thinking about it from my dialect, I do think there is a stronger voicing on the "s" in "scent" and "cent" but not the "s" in "sent" (might even be as distinct as /s/ versus /z/? But probably with a partial-voiced marker on one or the other?). Also, I think "cent" is the only one where the vowel seems always forced, not schwa-ed /ə/.
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.
Yes, being able to make a clear distinction is important, and subtle variations in pronunciation, whether officially recognized or not, do help. That's why, in particular, people tend to say "fur" instead of "for" - in order (my guess) to avoid confusing it with "four" (which is expected to appear more often in everyday speech than "fur" and "fir").
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.
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]
German final devoicing is in no way an argument against phonemic theory. You're right that some experiments have shown that it is possible to phonetically distinguish the final consonants in Rad vs. Rat. However, all this means is that the phonemic /ra:d/ is spelled out into [ra:d̥] and /ra:t/ into [ra:t], where [d̥] indicates a lower voice onset time than [t]. It still remains the case that the pronunciation is fully determined by the phonemes, without reference to the spelling or other factors.
I'm not a native english speaker, though I think I'm fluent speaking it... all of this to say that despite the sound being very similar, my lips movement differs between "det" and "debt":
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.
I’m a native English speaker and I can feel there’s a slightly different muscle I’m using to pronounce debt vs det. It certainly feels physiologically different to pronounce it. But then, I actually can’t really here any aural difference.
Also native English speaker. I find the I am breathing out on the e in debt but not det. So it gives a slightly longer and softer e. But hardly noticable and I thought I would say it the same before analyzing my words.
When you first try to teach someone pronunciation of your language, you may think about that kind of thing for the first time. "The tongue needs to be further forward", "the stress is on the other syllable", "that sound is between a and e", "there's a sort of tiny break here" etc. Much of it you can't even see in phonetic spelling.
> I may be crazy but I feel the ghostly presence of the “b”.
> 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.
So you feel that you somehow owe something to the b, but don’t have the wherewithal to pay up on the pronunciation of it. But it can’t just be removed from the ledger of letters used to compose the word.
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.
It's happened again and again with other words. "often" (older pronunciation: "offen"), "Anthony" (older pronunciation: "Antony") and "tortoise" (older pronunciation: "tortuss") are examples where the spelling pronunciation still hasn't totally won out. Words where the spelling pronunciation has reached fixation include "falcon" (older pronunciation: "fawken"), "reptile" (older pronunciation: "reptil"), "sphere" (older pronunciation: "spear"), "bankrupt" (older pronunciation: "bankrout"), "baptism" (older pronunciation: "baptime"), and "perfect" (older pronunciation: "parfit").
> It's happened again and again with other words. "often" (older pronunciation: "offen"), "Anthony" (older pronunciation: "Antony") and "tortoise" (older pronunciation: "tortuss") are examples where the spelling pronunciation still hasn't totally won out.
What are the "new" pronunciations for these? I'm a native speaker and I'd pronounce them the way you've indicated is "older".
Follow-up shower thought: French kids must deal with that on steroids, since a) most terminal consonant letters are silent, and b) it's mandatory to contract <le> to <l'> before a word that stars with a vowel sound. (Used <> as quotation markers just because the other options make it hard to parse.)
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.
I think they must have meant the unvoiced "th" from "thing" not the voiced "th from "the". I've only ever heard "Anþony". I can't imagine any native English speaker saying "Anðony" unless they're drunk or otherwise slurring their speech significantly.
In Canadian English we use the "Antony" and "tortuss" pronunciations as well. For "often", I usually only pronounce the 't' if the word is stressed in the sentence.
I was with you until tortoise. US English speaker here, but I have literally never heard anyone say “tor-toys”. I think I’d have a serious moment if I did. Is there some link you can throw our way to demonstrate the point? YouTube?
I can say I have heard this from native speakers, but I can't pull up any YouTube links right now. I suspect I've heard it from people who don't always go by the spelling pronunciation, in the same way many people who insert a T sound into often don't always do so. (I include myself in the "variable often" group.)
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.)
As someone from India, "tor-toys" is what you would hear from most Indians. For most words of the kind, in india they would be pronounced in exactly the way that would make you remember the spelling of the word (since you are graded on that). I would bet that's the case with most non native speakers.
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.
> some are saying it to "sound smart". It's funny, really.
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.
Do you pronounce the T in "soften"... maybe you use fabric "sof-ten-er"? Do you have a brush with "bris-tels"? Those would be more inclusive and modern pronunciations?
"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.
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.)
The L in "falcon" in the spelling pronunciation is a "dark" L, which is a pretty different sound from the "light" L, but it's still there. In most accents of English L regularly manifests with the "dark" sound before a consonant or at the end of a word, and with the "light" sound elsewhere.
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".
Or "special" - "You didn't miss Karen's special cookies, did ya?"
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?"
Sometimes is easier to transmit how it should really sound using the phonetic alphabet (i.e. ˈtɔrtəs instead of tortoise), but it is a bit harder to write with normal keyboards, and you have to learn how each phoneme sound. Used a lot tophonetics.com when was trying to learn how some texts were supposed to be spoken.
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.
The new pronunciations seem conventional enough now, although "offen/often" can go either way, and I can't say I've ever heard anyone pronounce "tortoise" in a newer way. Is it supposed to sound like the end of "turquoise?"
I had a paleontology professor as an undergrad who did reptile as rep-tul (reptle, maybe?), and I kind of loved it. I have no idea where he picked it up, he was from middle America and had a solidly American accent. He was quite old at the time, though, so maybe it was from when he was a kid.
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?
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 "adjacent". My inner voice pronounced it "ad-ja-sent", with a soft "a". I said it that way until someone corrected me in my mid-20s; even then, I didn't believe them at first when they said that was the way it was consistently pronounced. I confirmed it through several acquaintances before I adapted my speech.
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).
I had a similar experiences to you on both accords:
1. It wasn't until a class aged 14 where I heard the word 'chasm' spoken aloud and realised I had it wrong all those years.
2. It took me a some time to realise a word which sounded like 'rederick' was actually rhetoric.
I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one who did this kind of thing as a child. For me it was "archive" which I was pronouncing "ar-chiff" as opposed to "ar-kive". Took a while to break that habit.
I had a colleague (very smart guy, with excellent written English) who didn't believe me when I told him caveat was not pronounced the same as 'cave at'.
It's funny that sometimes these mispronunciations can become "standardized" in non-native cultures. For example, almost all Romanian programmers will pronounce "integer" as in-teg-ur, not in-tee-ger, because that's closer to how the word would be read in Romanian (though, interestingly, not identical - the natural Romanian pronunciation given that spelling would be in-te-ger, with both 'e's pronounced like the 'a' in tap, and with a soft 'g', like in german), and it's not a word you often hear spoken aloud in movies or TV shows.
Non-native speaker as well. I recently noticed the "b" is supposed to be silent, but then every time I say "debt" without the "b", phonetically I'm saying the same as "that". They sound the same to me, at least.
This is probably related to the fact that "bad" and "bed" sound exactly the same to me.
Related, yes, but the "th" in "that" should sound different (tongue touching edges of both top and bottom teeth, extending just past) from the "d" in "debt" (tongue touching roof of mouth just behind front teeth)
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)
Native speaker here, from the Ozarks (US, on the Missouri/Arkansas border).
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".
Non-native English speaker here. I don't know what the proper phonetical representation is for my pronunciation, but it sounds like 'kept', just with a b and a softer p.
Imagine skipping i in debit. Or just say deb - it will be close. I always pronounced it somewhat like this. [1] The worst thing is that i had heard the word pronounced by native speakers hundreds of times and did not notice. Now i am not even sure that b is there in [1]. Here is another example that certainly has b[2].
Yeah, when talking to non-natives I sometimes double-check if they understand words with silent letters/non-obvious pronunciation, but sometimes I just mispronounce them to be better understood, it's faster.
Interesting question, which will correct spelling or pronunciation... Coming from language that has almost perfect mapping between the two English never made any sense to me. And I think it is clearly field that should be fixed in either way.
> and often they pronounce those letters since they don't know about it.
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.
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 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.
In American English, unlike British English, œ and æ have mostly been collapsed into e. Compare encyclopaedia, foetus, faeces, diarrhoea, oestrogen. (But exceptions spelt the same way in both dialects: phoenix, oeconomics).
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.
If they've collapsed, neither AmE nor BrE speakers got the memo, as I've heard it mispronounced by both. Non-native speakers on the other hand tend to pronounce it correctly, as it's a common diphthong in other languages, such as French.
> 'the a is silent' isn't really right, because it's just a modern rendering of æ, there is no 'a' (or 'e') really.
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?
On your second point, I didn't mean that it was different in Latin than Greek, just that that's the etymology of the word being discussed here (and I only mentioned Latin since otherwise it's not really helpful because it's obviously an entirely different alphabet).
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.
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?
What does invalidate your point though is that you've got the cause and effect backwards: a dictionary is not the source of truth - native speakers are. A dictionary describes not prescribes.
If a dictionary is in disagreement with native speakers, it is the dictionary that will change, not the other way around.
Many words are spelt the way they were pronounced when the word was invented. However, that becomes interesting when you have hundreds of regional dialects and accents, mash it through 2 different languages and 500+ years since the spelling was set down. Take for example the word resume. Without the tick mark it means to restart something. Yet it can also mean your work history with and without the tick mark now. That is because it is a pain to type that word out with the tick mark. So the spelling of the word is changing yet pronounced in 2 wildly different ways. You have found one of those 'transition' words. Where it is changing but the spelling has not caught up yet. This comes up from the fact that the current alphabet has 26 letters yet there are at least 40+ phonemes. This weirdness comes up when 'english' borrows a word from another language that has one of those 'others'. The alphabet just does not really cover all of them in all cases. So oddities happen, and accents happen so you get weird bits like that. We paper over it with smashing together letters. But again because of accents that does not always work well.
Early 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".
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 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.
> Non native speakers tend to get to the point more easily.
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.
Thanks for your comment, it gives me a lot of insight. I had a look at your vocabulary as well.
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.
This sums up my experience travelling and living abroad.
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.
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).
It's a bit more narrow than this. Jokes, sarcasm, all kind of cheerful additions are almost always acceptable and welcomed unless you actually discuss some actual tragedy. "Foreigners" just don't joke in the same way, as it's hard to deliver a punch line, not to mention a properly timed one. I think that "personality" you talk about is still there on both sides, but is very different. The "native" one is great but hard to understand.
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.
As a native speaker, that is an interesting take on it and one I had not considered before, so thanks for pointing it out. It meshes well with my overall attitude when I see incorrect English - to accept people wherever their language skills may fall. After all, even us natives make mistakes. As long as we can understand each other, perfect language is irrelevant.
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'?
The only difficulty with "debt" from the perspective of English pronunciation is that B is voiced and T isn't. So you're right that "depped" or "debbed" would be more natural. But there's no need to add an epenthetic vowel.
Note: native English speakers don't pronounce "depth" with a t and h sound, they use a different consonant, where you basically bite the tip of your tongue and blow air over it, without engaging your vocal chords (the "th" in "the" is pronounced the same, but this time using your vocal chords as well - like the difference between 'p' and 'b').
> 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.
> edit: maybe people pronounce it like 'depth' with the 'th' replaced with a 't'?
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.
That's impossible in English though; 'b' is pronounced as a plosive, blowing through the lips as they open, while 't' is produced by tapping the tongue on the palate with lips open. So there is an interval between the 'p' and 't' which must be occupied by a vowel, typically a schwa.
'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.
Ah, but I'm a non-native speaker, I am not constrained by what is possible for native speakers. I suspect my 'b' is quite close to 'p' (but it's not exactly the same).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
I wouldn’t even try to use that word. I find that I can only speak as well as I write when I talk to near native speakers… I’d just say I want to pay or something
Which in exchange makes you easier to understand in most of the world. I have this with "rare" - such a problematic word for a slavic person and even if you nail it, non-native speakers may not get you. So it's better to actually say it with your mother tongue accent.
"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.
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'.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Ah, Ismo; perhaps my favourite Finnish stand-up comedian. (Ali Jahangiri may be second.)
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.
Non-native speaker here. True story: this was long time ago when we used to work in offices and people actually used to sit in tall cubicles with names printed on it. I was the new guy and needed some help from IT so I walked up to the cubicle of the IT guy called Sean and said "Hey Seen, how is it going". There was like 30 seconds of silence and he said "it's Shawn, whats up" and then followed a very awkward conversation :-)
I know a friend with that name, Sean. He works in consumer service dept and he is the only Sean/Shawn/Shaun in there, everyone knows they are asking for him. Usually his coworker will transfer the call to him and say "Give me a moment, I will transfer you to Sean, as in Sean Connery, who will handle this". It also help a lot when doing intake over the phone. If there are name are that so much similarities, it is best to use the reference of the name to help them.
"Sean" (properly, Seán) is actually an Irish Gaelic name. Irish, like English, features very many non-phonetic spellings. If the guy deliberately made you feel embarrassed for mispronouncing his name, he was just being a dick.
Having learned some Irish Gaelic in the past, I'd say it actually has much better correlation between spelling and pronunciation than English, it's just that it uses very different rules, which can cause confusion when the words are brought into other languages.
'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'.
Actually Irish is very phonetic, more like say German than English. The rules are just different because a roman alphabet was used for a non-romanic language. "S" is always pronounced as "sh" when surrounded by slender vowels. Many consonants in Irish have two different sounds for a slender and a broad pronunciation.
When we first started working with Irish teammates, we were confused about who people were referring to when they talked about Owen as there was no Owen in Slack at all.
But a thorn simply changed to a th, and was pronounced the same, no? The pronunciations for Þ are [θ] and [ð], which are spelled as "th" in modern English. ([θ] is "th" as in "think" and [ð] is "th" as in "father).
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.)
English 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 better to keep the b, if just for clearer etymology?
"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 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.
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.
Linguists call this usage a "generic intensifier", where whole meaning is stripped away and just means "more".
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".
There are no markers in 'det' that one can use to figure out whether the vowel is long or short. 'ee' is always long, and 'ett(e)' is always short.
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.)
> There are no markers in 'det' that one can use to figure out whether the vowel is long or short. 'ee' is always long, and 'ett(e)' is always short.
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.
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.
Were you aware that the "t" in "often" is traditionally not pronounced?
(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.)
I know many American speakers who pronounce the “t” in often, for the record. In fact, now that I think about it, I might do the same myself sometimes.
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.
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".
"Correct" is an under-specified term when discussing english pronunciation.
"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.
> Dropping the aitch from "historical" would be an example; it was a cockney habit, adopted by posh people
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".
Most latin-ish words in english came from Anglo-Norman; but some came earlier, from Old French. But it seems that phases of aitch-dropping have occurred repeatedly.
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.
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".
As someone who developed large swathes of his vocabulary from reading, I've been prone to mispronunciations of some of my more recondite vocabulary.¹ I can remember learning that indict was the same word as the "indite"² I'd hear on the news.³
⸻⸻⸻
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).
> English has not managed to shed its own. The language suffers similarly (and for the same reason) with the silent letters in doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island.
I'm confused. Which letter is silent in "plumber"?
In most of these cases the final B is itself silent but elongates the previous wovel for me. "dumb" is pronounced longer than "dum", and it's the U that gets elongated. The difference is subtle, but my native tongue has "long wovels" so I'm trained to detect the difference.
Can I ask what region you live in? Pronouncing <womb> as /wuːm/ is the dominant pronunciation in every English speaking country, so much so that I can't recall ever hearing it differently, and I'm surprised you've never heard it. It's not a recent change either, the /b/ disappeared somewhere before the 14th century.
New England. I've never paid enough attention when traveling to notice (those words aren't exactly the most common to hear), but when I say "woom" my lips end closed, and when I say "womb" my lips end opened after closing. The b isn't "voiced", per se, but it does change the way the word sounds to me.
And to be fair, I am aware New England English is its own distinct thing so I might have grown up in a bubble:
I oddly discovered this as well (not something I thought about) when watching a playthrough video for a boardgame (Brass: Birmingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzxf4tfq9as ). In there, he says "iron" as it should be said given the letters in the word. My wife and I are somewhat working to actually say the word that way now.
According to this[1], that's only in the USA... British English appears to drop the 'r' entirely (that's why I never hear it as I've lived in Europe and Australia)... and the American pronounciation seems so odd, is there any other word where the 'r' and the vowel are swapped like that? I know only one in British/Australian with "centre" being pronounced "center", but can't think of any others.
> British English appears to drop the 'r' entirely
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.)
The more I've embraced audio books and podcasts, the more I'm aware that I've been mispronouncing words. Probably. It's been kinda crazy.
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.
> But easy to miss stuff like which syllable gets emphasis...
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?
I don't know if this is an English-only thing or not, but the emphasis on a particular word in a sentence can convey some extra info.
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.
Yes, you pronounce the "t" in often. Some regions may not, but I'd say the majority of English speakers do. Pronouncing without the "t" sounds lazy to me.
> 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].
I still remember when I met a guy from Germany about 20 years ago...he spoke decent-enough English and I don't remember the context but somehow he started going on about the word "debt" and refused to believe the b was silent lol.
In my opinion, "colonel" is even more confusing.
As a son of expats, who had to pick up English early on I noticed that I do indeed shape my lips in the form of those silent letters, but never pronounce them.
As example when saying "debt" I will close my mouth entirely at some point, even though it shouldn't be necessary.
Ummm… I do. It’s not a hard b sound, but it is there. It sort of moves the location of the “t” sound down towards a “b.” It defiantly does not sound like “det”.
And I distinctly pronounce the “b” in “plumber” (another example in the article.
We all have our faults. But we don't need to promote them.
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".
There very much is a 't' sound in 'often,' but it depends on how you talk (whether or not there was before, language changes). If you're saying native speakers are saying it wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
Maybe you're young or speak a nonconventional dialect. In my local dialect (Midwest American), the "t" is almost never pronounced. I wouldn't say it's wrong to hammer the "t" home, but it sounds clumsy to my ears.
Linguists call it "spelling pronunciation": pronouncing as written, pedantically, despite not hearing it spoken that way. It's silly, but less silly than many other things. Of course, the more it happens, the more other people hear it that way and come to believe it is normal.
> 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.
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).
> 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”)
It's one thing to recognize two words have the same root, and mean the same thing, and something completely different to take a letter from one and stick it in the middle of the other one where it is never pronounced.
It's the same thing as debt and doubt. And, now there are people trying to pronounce that letter just because they see it in the word.
No, "often" is derived directly from "oft". This isn't a case of two words having the same root; it's a case of one word metamorphosing into the other word.
Both words were in use at the same time, by the same people, for different contexts. And, none of them who wrote the two-syllable word, on earliest remaining records, spelled it with a "t".
To demonstrate that "often" came from "oft" would require evidence that does not exist.
The difference between 'doubt' and 'doute' is the vowel sound, not a presence/absence of 'b'. 'debt' and 'dette' don't sound quite identical to me (as a native English speaker and learner of French) but they're very close and the difference isn't that there's a 'b' sound in there. Maybe it's that French 't' is slightly different.
French t is dental, English t is alveolar---in non-technical language, that means the French t is pronounced slightly further forward in your mouth, compared to the English t.
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.
per etymonline debitum is a conjugation of debere, 'to owe', potentially from de-habere, which basically means 'to take away'. habere may be from PIE *ghabh, to give or receive, possibly also the root of 'gavel'. ACLU claims many to most small claims cases are debt collection. This origin may be highly appropriate
Bit funny, really: the meaning is originally the same, but with a _debit_ card you don't run up a _debt_; that's with a credit card. (This is because with the debit card, your account is debit-ed immediately.)
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.