5 ms·

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 bui

by kmm 5y ago

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.

xeromal 5y ago
Regarding scent, I definitely notice a difference in my Appalachian brain. I feel like the s sound is more drawn out with the <c> present.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  I wonder if this might be a mental artifact of being aware of the spelling. Kids probably would hear no difference between 'scent', 'cent', or 'sent'.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    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.
    - Koshkin 5y ago
      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").
DemocracyFTW 5y ago
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] [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverhärtung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverhärtung [2] see doubts about the reality of the phoneme expressed by BE Vidos Handbuch romanische Sprachwissenschaft https://www.amazon.de/Handbuch-romanischen-Sprachwissenschaft-B-Vidos/dp/B0058F4J9K https://www.amazon.de/Handbuch-romanischen-Sprachwissenschaf... [3] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47503 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47503 and a number of other threads on the reality of linguistic models
asiachick 5y ago
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.
WorldMaker 5y ago
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.)

by kmm 5y ago

xeromal 5y ago

Regarding scent, I definitely notice a difference in my Appalachian brain. I feel like the s sound is more drawn out with the <c> present.

Koshkin 5y ago
I wonder if this might be a mental artifact of being aware of the spelling. Kids probably would hear no difference between 'scent', 'cent', or 'sent'.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  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.
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    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").

DemocracyFTW 5y ago

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] [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverhärtung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverhärtung [2] see doubts about the reality of the phoneme expressed by BE Vidos Handbuch romanische Sprachwissenschaft https://www.amazon.de/Handbuch-romanischen-Sprachwissenschaft-B-Vidos/dp/B0058F4J9K https://www.amazon.de/Handbuch-romanischen-Sprachwissenschaf... [3] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47503 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47503 and a number of other threads on the reality of linguistic models

asiachick 5y ago

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.

WorldMaker 5y ago

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.)