Re: More Ere:tas: The fable of the North Wind and the Sun

In a message dated 11/1/01 11:44:59 PM, jaspax@JUNO.COM writes:

<< I curious--could you supply a minimal pair for [o] and [O]?  I don't want

to start another interminable debate on English phonetics, but I'm

curious to see which pair of sounds you're splitting up that way.  Also,

how do you pronounce "get" versus "gate."  I'm guessing [gEt] / [gEIt],

whereas I clearly have [geIt] for the second one, with the first part of

the diphthong raised. >>

    First of all, I want to clear something up: I can distinguist [e] and [E]
AND [o] and [O].  I just thought it would be easier to see how [e] and [E]
could be mixed up--they're interchangeable in soooo many languages (Hawaiian,
Spanish...).  Now that that's out of the way:

Minimal pair: "coat", which, IN THEORY, should be [k_hot].  It's not--it's
[ow] or even [Vw], but you get the idea.  Some would even argue that the
vowel [o] doesn't exist in English at all.  And Eastern "caught" [k_hOt].  As
for me, "get" and "gate" are a minimal pair with [e] and [E].

    But anyway, even though I've never had [O] in my dialect, [o] and [O]
have always been night and day to me.  It's [O] and [A] that I find
confusing, and many people I've taken Linguistics classes with who are from
California share exactly the same sentiment.  It took me a long time to be
able to distinguish those two. And, since [o] is easily distinguishable from
[A], maybe that's where this came from.

-David

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