Re: English |a|

On 17 Jan 2005, at 2.42 am, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> TM> American English seems to have some sort of issue with short O vs
> AW,
>
> Not sure what you mean by that.
>
> WARNING!  YAEPT BEGINNING!
>
> I have four sounds in the range under discussion, best represented in
> English fauxnetics by "ah", "aw", "or", "oh".   Note that to my ear,
> this sequences represents a linear progression in sound; "aw" is
> between
> "ah" and "or" etc.
>
> 1. "ah" This occurs in "father", "water", etc, but also in the words
>    marked in my dictionary as possessing of a "short o" sound: Bob,
> cot,
>    dog, fog, got, etc.
>
> 2. "aw"  This occurs at the end of words like "caw" and "law", and also
>     before "dark" L, as in "call", "fall", etc.
>
> 3. "or" This sound does include the rhotic, but the quality of the o
>    there, even without the r-coloring, never occurs in my 'lect without
>    the following 'r'.  Example: "oratory".
>
> 4. "oh" This is the regular "long o" sound I have in "bone", "cope",
>    "dome", "go", etc.
>
>
> That sets my context.  Now what is the issue you find between "short o"
> and "aw"?
In spite of Mach's guess, probably (3) mostly. If as you seem to imply
you always have the same quality for a O before an R, then that's
probably the cause of the issue, but it's not something terribly easy
to quantify. (I have two values, short O or AW, depending on What
Happens Next so 'oratory' and 'chloro-' is /'Or@tSri/ and /'klOrVu/,
but 'chlorine' is /'klo:'r@in/.) And I thought Americans who
distinguished O and AW pronounced Dog as DAWG, but that might be
limited to *some* Americans. Also, 'water' oughta rhyme with 'oughta'
;)

That's not to say Australian English isn't without its issues here,
too; au really behaves for us like a single vowel, with length usually
implied by following consonants, as with say I or O, and /O/ as its
short value and /o:/ as its long value (I think, there's possibly
exceptions to that, but it's the best synchronous explanation for
things like 'Austria' /Ostri@/ and especially 'Aussie' /Ozi/, i.e. have
short O's. Historically, of course, it's probably just the reverse of
the lengthening O->O: that took place along with &->a:).

--
Tristan.

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