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It seems very common (particularly among non-native English speakers, but I've seen the typed form, though not the spoken form, from native speakers too) for people to type or even say "substraction" when they mean "subtraction".

What causes this error? There must be some loose rule that the word "subtract" fails to follow, to cause the -s- to be inserted so commonly. Is it a phonotactics thing?

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this; it's possible that english.SE would be a better place for this. Feel free to move it if so.

Hearth
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    This isn’t limited to English – as jogloran’s answer mentions, most Romance languages have actually codified the form with the s, and I’ve heard s forms used in German, Swedish and other languages where the standard form has no s, too. I would hypothesise it’s primarily due to influence from ab-, which is abs- before t-. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 06 '23 at 21:35
  • I’m voting to close this question because it belongs on English Language & Usage. – Graham H. Nov 07 '23 at 02:30
  • @GrahamH. I went back and forth between posting it there and posting it here several times. Feel free to move it. – Hearth Nov 07 '23 at 02:31
  • I struggled with this one myself (last time yesterday, even though I did select the correct one). If I think about it for a minute, I can see that it must come from subtrahere, subtraxi, but the "subst" group is so common in other words... – Vladimir F Героям слава Nov 07 '23 at 09:55
  • @Hearth Given that the phenomenon is common to many languages, not just English, you could just as well remove the “in English” part of the question and leave it here. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 07 '23 at 10:46
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    Subst seems rather common in scientific terminology: substitution, substructure, substrate, substance, substantial... I wonder, if this mistake is more typical for people with particular background (e.g., sciences/engineers vs. humanities.) – Roger V. Nov 07 '23 at 12:23
  • There are all sorts of typical mistakes in English (and all languages in fact) depending on what the source language is. In French and Spanish, subtraction is soustraction and sustracción. It would be a typical mistake. Just like Thanks God, for some Spanish speakers in English. This is a language learning question, not linguistics. – Lambie Nov 07 '23 at 15:58
  • Your point is just your opinion. How do you prove it?? – Lambie Nov 07 '23 at 18:00
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    @RogerV.: Also substage, substellar and substation. – dan04 Nov 07 '23 at 19:14
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    @RogerV. And not only is 'subst' a common pattern, but the consonant cluster 'str' is quite common, potentially resulting in 'muscle memory' turning 'subtract' into 'substract.' – David Conrad Nov 07 '23 at 19:24
  • Especially among computer programmers, who often need to take substrings of text. – dan04 Nov 07 '23 at 20:57
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    @Lambie What do you mean by that? I am asking a question based on an observation, not presenting any kind of opinion or anything that needs proof. – Hearth Nov 07 '23 at 21:55
  • See https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3640/is-substract-versus-subtract-a-proper-word and https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/296738/subtract-or-substract - I can confirm, as a French person, that subtract sounds weird to my ears. Even after discovering now that I mispronounced that word for many decades, I can't even convince myself to say it as expected. A quick informal poll around me shows that 100 % of native French when asked Give me some antonyms of 'ajouter' in English reply remove and substract. – jlliagre Nov 08 '23 at 13:15
  • woah, 35 years of using English in a professional setting and TIL this... I am French so the bs structure is more natural, but still. – WoJ Nov 08 '23 at 14:21
  • Larousse: soustraction [sustraksjɔ̃] nom féminin mathématiques subtraction il ne sait pas encore faire les soustractions he can't subtract yet //Things sound weird when you don't know them... – Lambie Nov 08 '23 at 17:33
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    @RogerV: You are close to convincing me that substraction is correct and almost everybody is saying it wrong. – A. I. Breveleri Nov 08 '23 at 18:05
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    The noun form "substraction" is *not* common. I had not seen it until I read this post (the closest is substaction). But misspelling of the verb forms are: substract, substracted, and substracting. Where did you sample? – Peter Mortensen Nov 08 '23 at 23:32
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    @PeterMortensen Years of everyday conversation with people at school and later at work, both in person and in emails. – Hearth Nov 09 '23 at 01:12
  • I'm with @PeterMortensen. I've never heard this mispronunciation before. – shoover Nov 09 '23 at 18:26
  • @shoover I mean to ask about all forms of "subtract -> *substract", anyway--I didn't worry about which specific form to mention in the question. The insertion of the s is what I'm asking about, and it didn't occur to me that the suffix could matter. – Hearth Nov 09 '23 at 19:35
  • @Hearth I mean to say, I've never heard "substract-" regardless of suffix. I've just never heard anyone insert an "s" sound between "sub" and "tract." It's just not done in my part of the world. – shoover Nov 09 '23 at 19:40
  • @shoover Don't underestimate our brain's capacity for autocorrection. Your ears may have heard it but the mispronunciation may not have reached your consciousness. – jlliagre Nov 10 '23 at 07:36
  • Substrate influence? ;) – Anton Sherwood Nov 12 '23 at 22:26
  • Another just spotted in some AoE2 patch notes: https://i.stack.imgur.com/bnLiW.png – Luke Sawczak Mar 02 '24 at 13:53

5 Answers5

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The combination bt doesn't appear very often in English (often where it appeared in Latin, it's been simplified in English pronunciation, like "subtle"), while bst appears in words like "abstract". I would chalk this up to analogy with the relatively common and similar-sounding word "abstraction". (In the comments, jogloran also mentions "distraction".)

Draconis
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    Also extraction, instruction, abstrusion, etc. – in general, there are lots of cases where you have a Latinate prefix and a /tr/ at the beginning of the following root, you get an kind of excrescent /s/ (even though the actual /s/ is only excrescent, other times part of the root or prefix). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 06 '23 at 21:26
  • And also subscription. – Yellow Sky Nov 06 '23 at 22:04
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    @JanusBahsJacquet The s in instruction is from the verbal stem struere (cognate to English strew) and not excrescent. – Sir Cornflakes Nov 07 '23 at 09:23
  • @YellowSky And subscription is from Latin scribere, with an initial s in the simple verb. – Sir Cornflakes Nov 07 '23 at 09:24
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    @SirCornflakes There was a word missing in my previous comment: it should have said, “even though the actual /s/ is only excrescent sometimes_”, alluding precisely to it being part of the root in _struere and an inherent part of the prefix in ex-. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 07 '23 at 10:45
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    The absence of real -bt- in English is indeed striking: debt and doubt are further examples of the treatment of this segment in spoken English. On the other hand, pt is quite common and not problematic at all: reptile, crept, ... – Sir Cornflakes Nov 07 '23 at 16:11
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    "bst" is also easier to type on a QWERTY keyboard, since touch typists will use the same finger for b and t. – Karl Knechtel Nov 07 '23 at 18:44
  • @SirCornflakes Can't this be generalized to voiced vs unvoiced consonants? Both f and c/k are common before t, but v and g not so much. I can think of a few compound words for gt, like ragtime, but I guess there might be some of those for bt too. – jkej Nov 07 '23 at 23:54
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    @SirCornflakes The reason for the silent bs in subtle, debt and doubt is that they all come from old French words that had no b in either spelling or pronunciation (soutil, dette, doute) and the b was added to the spelling by people who recognised Latin words (subtilis, debitum, dubito). This also occured with the silent p in receipt (Old French receite, Latin receptum), but not with the non-p in deceit (Old French deceite, Latin deceptum). Interestingly, the b was restored in French pronunciation for the modern French subtil, but not doute or dette. – Robert Furber Nov 08 '23 at 11:40
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    It's not bt: it's sub and tract. Sub is a prefix in English and very used. – Lambie Nov 08 '23 at 19:26
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I've noticed this too (particularly in non-native but high-level English speakers), but I'm not sure this question is answerable with firm evidence. Different speakers may make the error for different reasons.

If I had to guess, it could be interference from the words "abstraction", "distraction", but note that Spanish actually has sustracción, sustraer, etc, and French has soustraction /sustʁaksjɔ̃/, which might lead speakers of such languages to analogise to *substraction in English.

jogloran
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Technically, "substraction" is a real word, but it is outdated and considered erroneous in modern English.

However, it derives from the Late Latin "substractus", meaning "take away" and is an alternative form of "subtrahere", which is what "subtraction" is derived from.

According to Wiktionary.org, the usage of "substraction" is common amongst non-native English speakers due to the similarity to the French "soustraction" and the Spanish "sustracción", which both derive from the Late Latin "substractus".

You can also see this related question from English.SE about "substract" vs "subtract".

Andrew T.
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Nelson O
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  • Indeed, it is Medieval Latin. I was surprised to even find a very rare and obolete verb substrahovat(i) in a Czech dictionary, as a variant of rare and obsolete subtrahovat(i). So this dichotomy also exists even outside of Romance languages (+ English). – Vladimir F Героям слава Nov 07 '23 at 23:10
  • This does not explain why people make the mistake....B English speakers make a lot of other mistakes, too. – Lambie Nov 08 '23 at 19:27
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    @Lambie I think that it does explain it to an extent because the etymology of each variation of the word conforms to the rules of English and leads to the same concept. So, an English speaker could feasibly learn "substraction", and it would not feel wrong because it still conforms to the rules of the language. – Nelson O Nov 08 '23 at 19:48
  • @NelsonO I have been around (as an interpreter) Portuguese, French and Spanish and I have never ever heard this. Everyone just believes what the want to believe. Cheers. – Lambie Nov 09 '23 at 15:22
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Others have mentioned that it's likely to be interference from the more common combination st combination found in other words.

But is also seems like it's harder to pronounce bt. Say it slowly and notice the complicated lip and tongue movements that are required. Then insert the s and notice how it smoothes the motion.

Barmar
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    I don’t think ease of articulation really plays much of a part here, to be honest. Consider obtain and abstain which are mainly distinguished by the presence or absence of the /s/ – but I’ve never heard anyone mix those up. And I’ve certainly never heard anyone say *substerfuge or *substerranean (granted, these have a different stress pattern, which may also have an affect). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 07 '23 at 16:12
  • Good point, although notice that all those examples have a vowel after /bt/. – Barmar Nov 07 '23 at 16:46
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    But "bt" isn't pronounced, since the "b" and "t" are in different syllables. – RonJohn Nov 08 '23 at 16:28
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    It's interesting to note that obtrusive, the only other word that I could find in which bt occurs at a syllable boundary while followed by a consonant, also seems to trigger /s/ epenthesis frequently enough to warrant a Wiktionary entry for obstrusive as a misspelling of obtrusive. – Schmuddi Nov 08 '23 at 18:03
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    But it's not bt: It's sub-tract – Lambie Nov 08 '23 at 19:28
  • @Lambie I'm not trying to suggest that it's a single phoneme, just a connected sequence of phonemes. /b-t/ – Barmar Nov 08 '23 at 20:08
  • @Barmar But they are not connected except in writing...So, if you learn how to say the word, you wouldn't learn the mistake. – Lambie Nov 09 '23 at 15:17
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I'm not a linguist but I have (unscientifically) noticed as a native American English speaker that many people mispronounce words.

Some words are graced with this more often, with the mispronunciation sometimes even making it into an official source like a dictionary.

Sometimes letters are added, sometimes they're rearranged and sometimes they're removed. The s-sound and letter s seem to be frequent problems, such as with ask (as axe), espresso (as expresso), and even the recent persistent mis-pluralization of words like mom (as moms).

Consider that through the course of a primary education, most native American English speakers are introduced to subtraction (or substraction, as you point out) because it is a core concept in elementary mathematics. They may have cause to use the word often but some combination of society misleading them, difficulty saying certain letter combinations, underdeveloped speaking ability, various speech pathologies, and laziness may cause them to say it incorrectly. Once learned, it may never be corrected.

Stephan Samuel
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    Ax is a simple case of metathesis. The /ks/ variant is generally considered dialectally marked now, but it was just as normal and correct as the /sk/ variant for many centuries – Chaucer and the Tyndale Bible used it, for example. It may have arisen as a mispronunciation, but you can’t classify it as one now, unless you also want to call third and bird ‘mispronunciations’ of thrid and brid. Expresso is a case of analogy (ex- is an existing prefix, es- isn’t). And there is absolutely nothing wrong with pluralising mom as moms. What else would it be? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 07 '23 at 22:35
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    Aside from the tenuous connection to the question, "even the recent persistent mis-pluralization of words like mom (as moms)." — is... "moms" actually a mis-pluralisation? – jogloran Nov 07 '23 at 23:58
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Although it's off topic, I believe Stephan Samuel is referring to the use of -s as a hypocoristic suffix, in the specific case of "moms" referring to a single person, as used by black Americans. For example, Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., says "I got P-A-I-D, that's why my moms hate me. She was forced to kick me out" (my emphasis). I think "pops" is a better known example of the suffix, and in England we have the terms of address (for one person) "ducks" and "babes", so it's not exclusive to black Americans. – Robert Furber Nov 08 '23 at 11:20
  • "espresso" / "expresso" is covered by "Weird Al" Yankovic (at 1 min 39 secs). – Peter Mortensen Nov 08 '23 at 23:41