Is it common for English people to say “crap” instead of “crab”?

Question

When you read "crab", do you think of "crap"? Is it usual to pronounce wrongly?

Answer 1

Native speakers' brains are already on the right path. We won't mess it up in a conversation between native English speakers. When a native speaker hears, "What's your name? Mine ..." we already have "is" in our heads queued up. If we hear anything else, we will be surprised. A non-native speaker may not have this anticipation, and may hear "Minus" instead of "Mine is". This exact problem happened this morning between my German roommate and me.

Native speakers would almost never hear "minus" where the speaker said "mine is", and likewise we will never confuse "crab" for "crap".

Of course, I make the assumption that the speaker is also a native speaker. Non-native English speakers also have subtle linguistic clumsiness that throws off this anticipation effect. So another time we could mess it up is if the speaker says something that we have to parse word-by-word to understand, throwing off the sense of rhythm and anticipation.

Answer 2

No. They are two different words. If someone is saying crap when they mean crab, either their accent still needs a lot of work or else they really don't like the meal.

Answer 3

Voiced and unvoiced stop consonants at the ends of words can be hard to distinguish. Particularly at a break in the sentence or immediately before another stop consonant there really isn't much to voice, so the difference between 'p' and 'b' (and 't' and 'd', and 'k' and 'g') can be quite slight. Colin Fine points out that the preceding vowel tends to be lengthened before a final stop consonant, and thinking about it I have an unproven suspicion that it happens for stressed syllables too.

As @tenfour pointed out this doesn't matter so much for native speakers. We know without having to think about it what the next words plausibly could be in a spoken sentence, both from syntax and semantic information. We will frequently 'correct' what was actually said to fit our expectations. This can go as far as inserting entire omitted words because we know they must have been there. We have to be paying attention to notice that a mistake actually occurred.

I saw an entertaining experiment that demonstrated this effect in a TV documentary some years ago. One person was given a piece of text to recite, with secret instructions to get a word wrong. A second had to listen to what was being said and repeat it a second or so later -- English to English simultaneous translation, if you like! The repeater passed on the right word, without realising that there had been any error.

Answer 4

I suspect the two words have significantly different collocational profiles, so it seems unlikely that they would be mistaken for one another even during speech, although one could imagine a situation on a dock on the Chesapeake Bay, where a deck-hand on a fishing vessel saying "I have to take a crab" might be misunderstood as meaning "I have to take a crap", or vice-versa. In American English at least it seems that in addition to devoicing, vowel length might also distinguish the pronunciation of "crab" from that of "crap"

Answer 5

I think you are thinking that these two words (crab and crap) are same , but it's not like that. Crab and crap both are different words. Go to the links , you'll get the things clear.

• Crab

• Crap

Answer 6

I can't say I find it particularly common, but Dutch speakers of English might well pronounce them the same way due to their native language's devoicing of the final consonant (in a similar way that a Dutch speaker may have problems pronouncing a difference between beat and bead, and pod and pot.)