Back Vowel Phonemes

Mike Salovesh t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU
Mon Sep 18 11:28:49 UTC 2000


Dear Terry:

First off, I don't know how to solve the problem you pose. It may be
that you'd get just as far by flipping a coin as by trying to make a
fully rational decision.

There was a time, way back in prehistory, when I knew that God intended
all the
vowels you cite except the one in "on" and "upon" to be contained in a
single phoneme -- your ), some kind of low back vowel,  what Safire
includes in the same list as the initial vowel in "awful".  (The word
"God", of course, is not part of this series.  "God" rhymes with "cod"
and "rod" and "sod" and "plod"; the word's vowel phoneme is the same as
the one God intended to be in the words "on" and "upon".  Furthermore,
anybody who says "Gawd" either hasn't really talked with God or wasn't
listening to what God would have said.)

Then I met Peggy, the woman I eventually married.  (We just celebrated
or 45th wedding anniversary, which is why I refer all this to
prehistory.)  She seemed like a perfectly wonderful and compatible
person -- until she used what I know has to be the first syllable of
"awning" as her rendition of where the switch is when the light bulbs
are shedding light.  "Awn" and "Awff", orthographic "on" and "off", had
the same vowel phoneme! I was flabbergasted.

Since I was already blindly in love, as I still am, I took this quirk in
Peggy's idiolect to be an endearing personal trait. If anybody else
talked that way,   it could only be in defiance of God's Laws of English
pronunciation.

Naturally, in those days I was still the prescriptivist all my teachers
had been. I hadn't studied linguistics yet.  In my first course in
linguistics, which I took from Eric Hamp, I learned the Real Truth:
"don't get prescriptive until you know what people actually say."

I remember discussing Peggy's -ingless awning for "on" with Raven
McDavid.  (Peggy was working for him at the time.) Tracing her nomadic
childhood, we decided that she didn't get this "awn" thing from her
birthplace (which would have been Moorehead, MN, except that the only
local hospital was across the state line in Fargo).  Neither did it come
from her early school years in St. Paul, or the time she lived near Oak
Ridge, Tennessee.  We ascribed it to her sixth and seventh grade years
in Memphis.

My own speech is a relative of SAM, Bloomfield's label for "Standard
Average Midwestern", the closest approximation on this earth to how God
would talk if he ever chose to speak English. That's how I knew that
Peggy's pronunciation just won't wash.  (And it certainly won't warsh.)

All of which  still is no help in solving your problem of how to handle
the vowel or vowels in the set of words you cite.  My prejudices would
put "on" and "upon" in one set, with a; and all the rest in another,
with ).  The word "prejudice" properly describes that assignment.

-- mike salovesh   <salovesh at niu.edu>     PEACE !!!

TERRY IRONS wrote:
>
> I am currently working on a project that involves acoustic analysis of
> low back vowels in a regional variety of English.  As I move toward
> plotting of F1/F2 values, using a Labovian approach, I need to make some
> decisions regarding how to treat a subset of my data phonemically.
>
> All of the tokens vary, of course, but I have been able to place several
> items clearly into the ) category phonemically and the a category
> phonemically.
>
> The following set also all vary (which is indicated in major
> dictionaries, such as AHDE Edition 1):
>
> dog, lost, horror, on, upon, water, wash
>
> My query is, what vowel would you consider to be the underlying phoneme
> in each case, ) or a?  (I know, I know, choice of phoneme may depend upon
> idiolect, but remember that I am assuming a Labovian paradigm to
> facilitate one approach to studying change.)
>
> Virtually, Terry



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