Re: OT: YAEPT: English low vowels (was briefly: Re: Y/N variants (< OT: English a...

Gary Shannon wrote:
> --- "T. A. McLeay" <conlang@...> wrote:
>
>> Mark J. Reed wrote:
>>
>>> Right.  Not all Americans have the LOT/THOUGHT merger, not even those who
>>> have the PALM/LOT merger.  This is why there are so dadgum many lexical
>> sets
>>> in Wells's list; i'm almost certain that no single dialect distinguishes
>> all
>>> of them.
>> There's Americans without the PALM/LOT merger?
>
> I'm a native born American and I can't recall ever hearing anybody merge
> PALM/LOT. Both PALM/LOT and LOT/THOUGHT mergers would just sound weird to my
> Amuriken ears. PALM/THOUGHT on the other hand share the same vowel sound.
Really? The vowel referred to by the PALM lexical set is also the vowel
in fAther. In that case, does it still stand? You might be using a vowel
from a different lexical set in "palm" which makes it harder to discuss
the PALM/LOT merger but doesn't necessarily mean you don't have it.
Words can and do slip from one lexical set to another without creating
new lexical sets, and it might just be an unfortunate coincidence that
one such word for your dialect is the name of one of the lexical sets.
(I gather some Americans pronounce "palm" with an /l/, for instance, tho
I don't know if this is done with the vowel in the PALM, THOUGHT or TRAP
lexical sets.)

Therefore, another (equivalent) way of asking the same question "There's
Americans without the PALM/LOT merger?" is "There's Americans who don't
rhyme 'father' and 'bother'?".

I don't mean to second-guess you, it's just that it would be very
strange if [A] PALM merged with [O] THOUGHT but not with [Q] LOT
considering that length is non-phonemic in American English.

--
Tristan.

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