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 cla

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.)