Words With Silent B

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Hi, doing well. Who’s this and where are you?

My name is Vadim Grand. I’m calling from Montreal, Quebec.

Vadim.

Hi, Vadim. Welcome to the show. What can we help you with?

Well, I had a question. English is not my mother tongue, and sometimes it can be quite confusing.

And in the conversation it came up that the word climb or climbing, that the B is silent.

And I was wondering if it’s always silent.

Like, I sometimes tend to pronounce B definitely when I say climbing,

But I’m not sure if it’s right, because someone once mentioned that it’s not.

And is there, like, a hard and fast rule in terms of when sometimes the consonants are silent and when not?

So climb as in C-L-I-M-B, right?

Yeah.

That’s a really good question.

Like rock climbing.

Yeah, you kind of got caught that second language trap, right?

English has got all these traps all over it for people who don’t learn it from their mothers, right?

Yeah.

Sometimes the rules aren’t that hard and fast.

There’s a couple of interesting things happening with this word and a couple of other similar words.

There’s a fellow by the name of John Wells who’s written on this, and I’ve read his stuff.

He’s a phonetician.

And he talks about how interesting it is that in the 1300s, the B stopped being pronounced in words like climb.

We used to say climb, right?

Climben.

Climben, right.

Climben, yeah.

And same for bomb, B-O-M-B.

We got it from Italian.

We used to say bomb, right?

So the reason it disappears is really simple, though.

It’s actually mechanical.

Our M sounds and our B sounds, the M and the B, both happen with our lips.

And they tend to combine, and the B gets swallowed up, more or less.

These are non-technical terms, and all my sociolinguistic friends are, like, smacking their foreheads.

But it’ll do for us.

And so that’s pretty much what happens.

So for mechanical reason, we were looking for an easy way to say the words.

We just dropped the B from them.

But as John Wells points out, there are some other words that are related etymologically where we still pronounce the B.

So, for example, climb is related to clamber.

And we will say you clamber up the slope of a hill to get to the top.

It’s kind of like hands and feet working together, all touching the ground to get to the top.

Or crumb, like a crumb of toast, and crumble, as in the toast crumbled.

So in the first one, we don’t say the bee.

In the second one, we do, and they’re etymologically related.

Thumb, as in the thumb on your hand, and thimble, the little metal object that we use to sew with so we don’t poke ourselves.

So it’s interesting.

English is, again, lots of little traps here.

What’s your first language?

Russian.

But I learned French before I learned English.

Yeah, yeah.

So you have a great appreciation then for the language, right?

For English, I’m…

I do, I do.

It’s a beautiful language,

And I enjoy also reading Shakespeare as well.

But it’s a bit of a complication sometimes

With all the Germanic and Romantic rules

Combining to make one soup.

Soup is a good word for it.

If you’re looking for a general rule,

Any word, any root word,

Let’s say, the infinitive form or the noun form of a word where the B is not pronounced.

The B is not going to be pronounced if you inflect the verb comb, as in comb your hair.

It’s comb, combing, comer.

We just don’t do the B.

Okay.

I’ve been pronouncing Bs in all of those words.

You are utterly forgiven, and there’s no worry about it at all.

A man who speaks three languages is going to find himself making mistakes in all three languages,

And that’s totally fine.

All right?

Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for coming.

Good luck.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Have a good day.

Bye.

So that’s great, right?

That’s a really good question.

And maybe it’s a thing that a native speaker wouldn’t have thought of.

Exactly.

And we probably wouldn’t have made that mistake because we learned those words early and we learned them without the B sound.

So the outsider coming in sheds new light on the thing that we take for granted.

I love that about language.

Yeah, yeah.

I love that about the people who speak English as a second or third or fourth or fifth language.

Incredibly competent in English to me, too.

Right.

It’s very good.

Right.

And learning more, as we all are all the time, right?

Yeah, not stopping, right?

Exactly.

It’s that movie Speed, right?

You can’t stop this bus.

Call Keanu and me.

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