[eozoon]

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]

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]

Drawring lol. That r just magically appears after ahh or ohh, and almost everyone is shocked when you point it out.

[Threeve303]

Drawring is how it is pronounced in Warshington and Chicargo as well.

[denton-scratch]

"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.

[tsimionescu]

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.

[ncmncm]

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".

The extremum of ironic usage is "yeah, right".

[boondaburrah]

Ah yeah the boston 'r' will do the same thing - appearing as needed to separate two vowels.

[Koshkin]

Well, Bostonian accent is an extreme case - they would say “today’s agender: the question of genda.”

[kwhitefoot]

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]

> My pronunciation of drawing definitely does not include an r.

Oh, I'm quite sure it does. :-)

[saalweachter]

I grew up near the Wabash ("wal-bash") river in Indiana.

[srcreigh]

English. Emphasis on the ish.

[pessimizer]

> If it were just spelt "det" I feel like it'd have a more prominent t sound.

If it were just spelled 'det' the vowel would start jumping around. You'd have to go 'dett' or even 'dette' in order to avoid 'deet'.

[thaumasiotes]

> If it were just spelled 'det' the vowel would start jumping around. You'd have to go 'dett' or even 'dette' in order to avoid 'deet'.

Huh? None of this makes any sense.

[pessimizer]

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.)

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

[frutiger]

> If it were just spelt "det" I feel like it'd have a more prominent t sound.

In other examples, the prominent “t” sounds and the vowel seems to vary based on emphasis. Compare:

1. Marriage? We only just met yesterday!

2. I’m not really sure, I think I met him four or five years ago.

[inciampati]

How are these different? What is changing?

[CRConrad]

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.