[garmaine]

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]

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]

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.

[vehemenz]

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.

[ncmncm]

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.

In some times and places it becomes normal.

[kwhitefoot]

I would only pronounce the t when emphasizing the word.

[boondaburrah]

That and if you need to hit the back of an auditorium without a mic.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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).

( https://www.etymonline.com/word/often )

> 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”)

( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/often )

Where did you get the idea that they weren't related?

[ncmncm]

The words are obviously related. But that doesn't mean one came from the other.

[thaumasiotes]

> The words are obviously related.

You just said they weren't...?

[jwilk]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/correct-pronun...

> Often has a medial /t/ that, like similar words such has "hasten" and "soften," was once pronounced and is now typically silent.

[srcreigh]

Same with Toronto. It's really more like Turonno

[wazari972]

Native French speaker here,

same, I woulnd't pronounce "debt" the same way I would pronounce "dette" in French, and likewise for "doubt", which would turn in French "doute" ...

[jgtrosh]

Shame, since “debt” is pronounced exactly like « dette »

[pm215]

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.

[housecarpenter]

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.