24 ms·

Nobody Pronounces the 'B' in 'Debt'

• awinter-py 5y ago
  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
• Meph504 5y ago
  [edit]This was a failed attempt at humor, sorry.[/edit]
  • Tempest1981 5y ago
    Could that be the word "debit", as in ATM debit card? - Debt is the amount owed, often with interest charged. - Debit is a negative entry on a balance sheet.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• johtela 5y ago
  We Finns especially struggle with this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxWwdeGz1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxWwdeGz1Q
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    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.
• flint 5y ago
  I can still hear my accounting professor pronouncing it. Debits and Credits both have 2 sylables.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    "Debit" may have two syllables, but "debt" has only one. They're two different words.
• stn8188 5y ago
  This topic was just recently discussed in what is probably my favorite non-engineering podcast, the History of English Podcast: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/10/30/episode-153-zombie-letters/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/10/30/episode-153-z...
  • tclancy 5y ago
    Came here to say the same! I learned my name starts with a Th because it’s a thorn, not a th.
    • SamBam 5y ago
      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.)
  • Mimmy 5y ago
    Slightly off-topic but what's your favourite engineering podcasts?
• garmaine 5y ago
  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.
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    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".
    • boondaburrah 5y ago
      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.
      • kwhitefoot 5y ago
        I would only pronounce the t when emphasizing the word.
        • boondaburrah 5y ago
          That and if you need to hit the back of an auditorium without a mic.
      • vehemenz 5y ago
        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.
• timonoko 5y ago
  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.
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    Anybody who knows won't.
    • timonoko 5y ago
      Me knows, but I wont. Some bulgarian innkeeper will not understands any detts. But insists on me paying my deBts with special emphasis on "B".
      • toxik 5y ago
        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
        • szszrk 5y ago
          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.
          • toxik 5y ago
            "I would like my stake medium seldom, please." 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.
• eozoon 5y ago
  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?
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    No, there is nothing there at all. If you look on a sonograph, "debt" and "det" sound exactly identical. 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".
    • robbedpeter 5y ago
      Drawring lol. That r just magically appears after ahh or ohh, and almost everyone is shocked when you point it out.
      • Threeve303 5y ago
        Drawring is how it is pronounced in Warshington and Chicargo as well.
      • kwhitefoot 5y ago
        It varies. My pronunciation of drawing definitely does not include an r. Perhaps it has changed over the last 65 years of my life. Or it is a regional pronunciation. I suspect that more young people include the r.
        • CRConrad 5y ago
          > My pronunciation of drawing definitely does not include an r. Oh, I'm quite sure it does. :-)
      • 5y ago
• Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  ... you aren't supposed to pronounce b in debt? What? TIL
  • rswail 5y ago
    or the "t" in often.
    • Koshkin 5y ago
      Unlike ‘b’ in ‘debt’, it is often pronounced by native English speakers.
    • werdnapk 5y ago
      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.
• Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  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'.
  • tsimionescu 5y ago
    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 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).
    • rjtavares 5y ago
      Minor correction: it's also "subtil" in Portuguese.
      • tsimionescu 5y ago
        Google translate must have failed me here... It claims "sutil".
        • rjtavares 5y ago
          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.
• 1_player 5y ago
  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.
  • Dracophoenix 5y ago
    You're free to blame vapo(u)rwave for that.
  • srcreigh 5y ago
    Do you pronounce it ayesthetic?
    • kreeben 5y ago
      To my ears it's the most beautiful when you replace "ae" with the "e" sound from "meh". Eh-stetic
      • 1_player 5y ago
        It's not just a matter of beautiful, it is correct. Ah-stetic on the other hand is wrong, widespread and the reason of my crusade.
        • janto 5y ago
          tomato tomato
          • CRConrad 5y ago
            I.e. tomayto tomahto.
• laurent123456 5y ago
  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.
  • islon 5y ago
    Non native speaker here. I always pronounced the b in debt and in doubt. Learned something new today =)
    • MathCodeLove 5y ago
      Could you show phonetically how it sounds when you say those words? Im struggling to imagine what pronouncing the b would sound like
      • mhitza 5y ago
        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.
        • xeromal 5y ago
          Like Johnny Dept. hahah
      • mcprwklzpq 5y ago
        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]. 1. https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs?t=10 https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs?t=10 2. https://youtu.be/Ws22Nsg1lBI&t=10 https://youtu.be/Ws22Nsg1lBI&t=10
    • napsterbr 5y ago
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I think I've heard some people pronounce it before, really there is no accent anywhere that does? Anyway maybe I shall start to pronounce, I think it sounds fine as debt instead of det.
• dorianmariefr 5y ago
  As a non-native english speaker (french), I was pronouncing those words wrong I guess: debt, doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island
  • jstanley 5y ago
    How were you saying "indict"?
    • dorianmariefr 5y ago
      https://voca.ro/17YDT0eVw4Jh https://voca.ro/17YDT0eVw4Jh
      • jstanley 5y ago
        Isn't that correct?
        • yorwba 5y ago
          https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/indict https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/indict
        • jeroenhd 5y ago
          The correct (or at least, American English) pronunciation is "indite" (see https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/indict 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".
        • denton-scratch 5y ago
          "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.
• senectus1 5y ago
  So can we finally spell Fish like GHOTI ?
• kgeist 5y ago
  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".
  • williamdclt 5y ago
    As you'd expect, the g and the t are both silent
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• jtsiskin 5y ago
  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.
  • dougmwne 5y ago
    In my accent it is pronounced with an extra breathy “H”, deht vs. det.
    • Moto7451 5y ago
      I’m from Southern California and pronounce it the same way.
  • deberon 5y ago
    I don't know if you're crazy, but I just said "let let det" about a dozen times to myself in my office ;)
  • quitit 5y ago
    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.
    • nh23423fefe 5y ago
      I'm from New England. I pronounce both det and debt exactly the same. 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
• teilo 5y ago
  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.
  • senkora 5y ago
    Debt was borrowed into English from Old French, where it had already lost the b, rather than from Latin. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/debt https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/debt
    • kxjkckicllfhhh 5y ago
      Consider reading the article discussed for correct info. Wiktionary does not even claim what you just did.
      • ravi-delia 5y ago
        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.
      • GavinMcG 5y ago
        > From Middle English dette, dett, borrowed from Old French dete It seems to.
        • mellavora 5y ago
          but wouldn't that Old French go back to a Latin root?
• robofanatic 5y ago
  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 :-)
  • Supernaut 5y ago
    "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.
    • robofanatic 5y ago
      No he was actually a good guy, we became friends later. I apologized for butchering his name.
    • julesnp 5y ago
      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'.
    • kiliantics 5y ago
      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.
      • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
• Tade0 5y ago
  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.
• mfontani 5y ago
  > 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"?
  • cbowal 5y ago
    The "b"
  • housecarpenter 5y ago
    English doesn't tolerate word-final -mb. It's always pronounced as -m, and the -b isn't pronounced when a suffix is added either. Other examples: dumb, tomb, comb, womb, numb, thumb, catacomb, Coulomb. All of these have a silent B.
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      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.
      • CRConrad 5y ago
        Paljon suomalaisia täällä?
        • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
          Empiirisesti ehkä muutama tuhannesta.
      • julesnp 5y ago
        That's true for the -omb words, but I've never heard anyone elongate the 'u' in any of the -umb words, at least not in Canadian English.
    • 5y ago
• specialist 5y ago
  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.
  • brabel 5y ago
    > 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?
    • falcolas 5y ago
      IME, Juice gets more of a 's' sound: 'Joos'. Jews is more of a 'z' sound: 'Jooz'.
  • mekal 5y ago
    "He got his just deserts when forced to desert his dessert in the desert."
  • mekal 5y ago
    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.
• hateful 5y ago
  My favorite example is when two types clash. For example number and number. One meaning to be more numb and the other meaning numeric digits.
• z3phyr 5y ago
  English not being my mother tongue, I used to read words as they are written (as is the norm in my language). So I did use to say de-b-t.
  • falcolas 5y ago
    English has inherited too much French for this to work well, unfortunately. Our hour writes the right mnemonic sandwich.
• phlakaton 5y ago
  𐑓𐑹𐑗𐑩𐑯𐑩𐑑𐑤𐑦, ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑢𐑦𐑔 "𐑛𐑧𐑑" 𐑣𐑨𐑟 𐑕𐑪𐑤𐑝𐑛 𐑓 𐑞 𐑥𐑧𐑛𐑩𐑤𐑦𐑙 𐑝 𐑤𐑦𐑯𐑜𐑢𐑦𐑕𐑑𐑦𐑒 𐑣𐑨𐑒𐑕. 𐑥𐑴𐑕𐑑𐑤𐑦. (Fortunately, Shavian with "det" has solved for the meddling of linguistic hacks. Mostly.)
• swader999 5y ago
  I do for fun.
• mekal 5y ago
  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.
  • Ancapistani 5y ago
    "Colonel" ain't got nothin' on "boatswain" and "coxswain".
  • odiroot 5y ago
    Wonder if he'd get a hart attack if you mentioned lieutenant as well.
    • mekal 5y ago
      "German man dies of heart attack during heated debate over article about former Lieutenant Colonel Joaquin Phoenix."
• stakkur 5y ago
  There's a reason, buried in the word's evolution: https://www.etymonline.com/word/debt#etymonline_v_832 https://www.etymonline.com/word/debt#etymonline_v_832
• jkingsbery 5y ago
  > 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]. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=debt https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=debt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance
• djhaskin987 5y ago
  Yet further evidence that English is now (even if it wasn't before) chiefly a written language first, and a pronounced language second.
• dgfitz 5y ago
  Edit: Ignore me 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.
  • dwaltrip 5y ago
    What? The article is about the word “debt”, not “debit”.
  • Jtsummers 5y ago
    This is about the word "debt", not "debit" (in which the 'b' is pronounced). The card is called a debit card.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    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.)
• mrkramer 5y ago
  As an non-native English speaker I always wondered why....This explains why but still Det pronunciation sounds weird.
• intrasight 5y ago
  I pronounce the 'b' in 'debit' to distinguish from 'debt'
• dhosek 5y ago
  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).
• zhte415 5y ago
  A lot of comments are in need of some IPA [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...