Re: OT: "Claw" (was "I'm new at this")

I do hate to prolong this thread, but.......
Christophe wrote:


>En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:
>
>>
>> 1.) First, we're talking about the word "claw", which is usually the paw
>> of
>> an animal which has with sharp nails.
>>
>Yes.
>> 2.) [A] is a low, back, unrounded vowel, and [aw] is a front, low,
>> unrounded
>> vowel followed by a labio-velar glide (or some sort of high, back,
>> rounded
>> coda), forming a diphthong.
snip etc.

>First problem. In your dialect maybe, but I never heard "clod" pronounced
with
>[A]. At most with [O]. Also, [5] in that position I never heard (and I *do*
>recognise this one normally). Is it pronounced this way in British English?
I think you'll hear "clod" [klA:d]  (never mind the "l" sound) from most
General American spikkers; [klOd] from most Brits. It's possible their /O/
might be a shade higher and tenser than the American variety, so it might
sound more like [o] to you.  And there might be a schwa-like offglide
corresponding to the length before voiced final.

Between your well-learned English and my poorly-learned French, I think the
closest French analogue to American /O/ [O]  is the nasalized vowel in such
things as leçon, son, mon, con (sorry!), except ours is not nasalized.

>No for the first part, but yes for the second. OK, so "aw" in claw is not
the
>same as in "clown", but it's definitely a diphtongue, ending as high as the
>diphtongue in "clown" or "cloud".
Now it strikes me that things have been derailed, and gone off at cross
purposes-- "aw" is one of the ways English spells /O/.  "/aw/" is the
phonemic representation of the diphthong in "cloud, clown".

As to whether it's a diphthong or not, phonemically, it's a bit of a
problem-- /O/ _is_ a tense vowel (in that it can occur in a CV monsyllable)
yet it has no lax counterpart.  OTOH if we insist (I don't) that the system
is symmetical, it should be the _lax_ version of /ow/ ---
front / iy i  ey e æ/  vs. back /uw u ow {o??? O???}  a/.

>Just on TV, so I cannot tell what dialect it could be. But it didn't seem
to be
>any special dialect, since the rest was pretty much standard (as in, it was
no
>marked dialect that I would recognise as such). I think it was non-rhotic.
>Also, I heard it more than once, and on different programs, so I doubt it's
so
>peculiar.
 Perhaps it was one of those nature thingies produced and narrated by
Australians, in which case all bets are off.  The platypus with that famous
poisonous claw.........:-))))))