Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words

John Cowan wrote:
> Tristan scripsit:
>
>> He's already got 'borough' in the list once, and /bVrou/ (which
>> I've never heard, but you and John assure me that it exists) would
>> be dealt with by 'though', wouldn't it?
>
> The point of treating "borough" separately from "though" is precisely
> that some dialects make it schwa, whereas others make it the long
> sound of "o", so it's a separate diaphoneme.
Yeah, I know. Whoever I was replying to suggested cheating and making it
two; I was merely showing why you couldn't.

> Technically, "hough" and "lough" are also separate cases, since some
> pronounce "lough" with [x], whereas AFAIK no one does that with
> "hough".  I'm not sure what RI does with "lough"; changing it to
> "lock" would cause a serious semantic collision.
When you talk of a serious semantic collision, do you mean making
homographs(?) of homophones? Isn't that what happens when you reform
spelling? I guess you could do 'lok', everyone'd know what it meant. But
is it such an issue? I'd never even heard or seen either word before
(and 'hough' doesn't show up in m-w.com, and 'haugh' is called Scottish
dialectal; 'lough' is marked as Irish dialectal).

I think even those words are cheating when you go on about how many
different pronounciations -ough can make, because if you include
dialectalism, you might as well include the monophthongal and
diphthongal pronunciations of the long O sound in 'though'.

Tristan.