Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 101st episode.

Today I'm going to talk about the word subtle, S-U-B-T-L-E.

We can use the word subtle to learn a couple of different things about pronunciation and a bit of history of English.

If you're not familiar with the word subtle, it's a useful vocabulary word to know.

It's an adjective that means a very tiny change or a small difference.

An example sentence is,

There is a subtle difference between the short O and A-W sound.

Ah, awe.

The first interesting thing about the pronunciation of the word subtle is that silent B in the middle of the word,

S-U-B-T-L-E.

Why is that B there, and do any other words follow a similar pattern of a silent bee?

Let's start with why it's there.

It's there because, a couple of hundred years ago,

some people who thought they were very smart decided it should be there.

According to the etymology online dictionary,

the word subtle entered English around the year 1300 from

the old French word sutil. At that time, the letter B was absent from the spelling and everything

made sense. Then the etymology online dictionary says something that I don't completely agree with.

They report that the letter B was added to the word subtle because of the confusion with another word, subtile,

which we got from the old French word, subtyl. I can see the relationship between those words,

and that is a reasonable explanation.

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