Re: Personal langs and converse of aux

Jesse S. Bangs wrote:
>> >There are other oddities, too, in people's phonetic ability.  I can
>> >pronounce the rounded front vowels without too much difficulty, but I
>> >can't distinguish [o] from [C>
>>
>> West Coast dialect, principally.  But I'd have to hear it to believe it.
>> Coat/caught?
>> low/law? sow, sew/saw? row/raw?
>
>All of these are [@u] or [Vu] (not sure of exact phonetic value) in the
>first example and simply [a] in the second.  There may be *very* slight
>rounding on the vowel, but in that case it would be a falling diphthong
>[Qa].  In any case, there is no rounded back non-high monophthong in my
>dialect of English, although there are some monophthongal allophones, like
>'goal' [gOl] (I think.  It may be [gol], but my problem of course is that
>I can't distinguish them.)
>
Well then, you DO distinguish /o/ [@u] from /C/ [a].   Anyway, I got my
signals crossed-- Western US tends to merge /C/ and /a/ so that rot/wrought,
cot/caught, etc. are homophones.  Apparently you have that merger.