Re: English |a|

Steg Belsky wrote:

> On Jan 17, 2005, at 2:50 AM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> > TM> And I thought Americans who distinguished O and AW pronounced Dog
> > as
> > TM> DAWG, but that might be limited to *some* Americans.
>
> > The "dawg" pronunciation is an exaggerated example of the "Southern
> > drawl", and I wouldn't say it is in general related to whether or not O
> > and AW are distinguished.   Which, btw, they *aren't* in my dialect,
> > really; I'd say they're allophonic variants of the same sound.  For
> > instance, the words "call" and "doll" are exact rhymes, both having the
> > "aw" sound, while "cot" and "caught" are exact homophones, both having
> > the "ah" sound.
> > -Marcos
>
> "Dog" is pronounced 'dawg' in NYC also.
> Hmm... i wonder what the distribution for (short O) /a/ and /O/ is in
> my NYC dialect.  It seems sorta halfhazard (sic ;) ):
> dog /O/
> god /a/
>
The "dawg" pronunciation is prevalent in midwestern dialect AFAIK, likewise
in fog-log- hog-, but "ah" in togs, cog, flog, toggle, boggle, (modern) blog
etc. Seems to me it's also /a ~A/ in all other CoC words-- hop, rot, mock,
God, botch etc. I've been hearing these all my life, so the change to /O/
isn't recent. Haphazard indeed.

Whether we have /o/ or /O/ before /r/ is debatable. One could call it
"lowered o" or "raised O"; in fact in the IPA I learned in the 60s, there
was a special symbol for this intermediate vowel, but it seems to have been
eliminated.

I had the impression Tristan's comment referred to the difference between
"pot" [p_hOt]? and whatever sound he has in "saw, law" etc. IIRC he (or
perhaps Adrian) claims that /O/ has very limited distribution in Austr.Engl.

In midwestern speech (certainly mine) phonemic /a/ seems to be more open
[A], similarly /O/ seems more [Q], at least as I match them to the various
IPA sound samples.

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