Re: Spelling pronunciations (was: rhotic miscellany)

John Cowan wrote:
> "Wash" has /O/ in my dialect, but I realize that this is not determinative
> about /wOrS/-dialects, because "Washington" is /wAS-/
I have /O/ in both.
>
> W/r/t Canadian English or RP, which maintain all of the original
> distinctions,
> my dialect has unrounded short /O/ but not long, so "pot" has /A/ but
> "law" does not.
Same here.

In the case we are discussing, where /w-/ precedes, it seems to
> be entirely lexical which words have /wA/ and which have /wO/.
I don't know how it works historically, but all the other "a" = [O] words I
can think of involve an orthographic "-alC-": walk, talk, balk, hall, small,
chalk (albeit with many exceptions too: palm, qualm have [a~A]). One might
include "-arC-" quart(z), wart, swarthy; and again with exceptions, smart,
quark, dark with [a~A]-- IIRC others do have [O] in many of these words.

In pondering this thread, I tried to come up with a true rhyme for [wOS]--
there doesn't seem to be one.(1)  Add "wash" to the list with "orange" :-).
And if it's [wAS], the only rhymes seem to be slangy-- gosh, cosh, posh,
bosh, nosh. (I think I've seen "garsh" in written "dialect" somewhere, but
have never heard it.)
---------------------------
(1) Even the faux verb 'to swash' < swashbuckle has [A], as does
"(s)quash" -- so the /w/ isn't necessarily the causative factor.
---------------------------

"Water" is
> a particularly vexed case:  I think I natively have /wOtr=/, but these
> days
> I find myself saying /wAtr=/ as often as not merely in order to be
> understood.
>
Same here; it's the one word for which I was mercilessly teased by the
Easterners in boarding school. I must have been using a very open [A],
probably with typical midwestern nasality too. By the end of my first year I
was saying /wOtr=/.  50 years on, I still use /O/ mostly, but after 40 years
in Michigan often slip back to an [a] or [A] sound.