Comment by dcminter

Comment by dcminter 8 hours ago

9 replies

> the b in debt

English speaking Swedes often transform this silent b into a spoken p which is about as awkward a result as you're imagining.

glitchcrab 8 hours ago

I work for a small remote company with employees all over Europe; it's pretty common for most non-native English speakers to pronounce it this way. Especially noticeable with Germans.

  • dcminter 5 hours ago

    Interesting; I don't recall hearing it pronounced like that from my Polish colleagues, so perhaps it's something about the Germanic languages specifically?

[removed] 4 hours ago
[deleted]
walthamstow 6 hours ago

You'd have to be a pretty mean native English speaker to judge people on how they pronounce silent letters

  • junon 2 hours ago

    Quite the contrary. I live in Germany, for the most part they're pretty thankful, just as I am when they correct my German.

    • dcminter an hour ago

      Anyone correcting my Swedish is in a target rich environment!

  • dcminter 5 hours ago

    Who's judging? I'll save that for when my Swedish är lite mindre dålig! It's just a little strange that the "b" somehow transforms into a "p" when "b" is a perfectly common letter in Swedish. If they just pronounced the "b" I wouldn't have thought it at all notable.

junon 2 hours ago

Lots of Germans do this too, in my experience.

[removed] 5 hours ago
[deleted]