ah/ awe

[Paul Johnston]

Dear Tom,
(1)  Usually, a merger IS a substitution,  One sound gets replaced by
a nearby one which survives.  Occasionally, they meet in the middle.
But there are more cases of what you would call substitution.
(2)  It's not a matter of WANT to.  In the cases where something is
really easier to say (and I'd put knight > night  and car > cah here,
but not awe . ah--they're both equally easy to say)--it;s a matter of
keeping speech flow fluent, so we don't talk like old-time computers,
and talk at a normal rate of speech, like our parents, peers, and
every native speaker we hear.
(3) Spoken language precedes written language.  That is just a fact,
both for individuals (kids learn to speak LONG before they read and
write) and societies (we've been speaking for who knows how many
thousands of years, but writing for at most 5-6 thousand, and that's
not for alphabetic writing, which is keyed to sound, either).  So it
makes no sense to bring the spoken language closer to the spelling,
which is learned later and is dependent on the spoken language, not
the other way around.  If anything, it makes sense to have spelling
reform, to make the spelling system "conform" (and conformity is a
matter of convention and northing more).  But that's hard to do--the
pull of tradition is too strong.
(4)  English spelling has its own history, too, including at least
one complete overhaul in the Middle English period when the majority
of scribes )perhaps) were used to writing in French and using their
conventions rather than a  native system that was used for Old
English.  The result was a compromise.
(5) NO one in English has ever pronounced the "p" in pneumonia, where
the spelling reflects Greek, not English.  Neither have we had a /pn/
cluster even in Old English.  K-not is a different story.  In
Standard English, we had it up to the 17th century, and if you want
to hear it now, go to the Shetland Islands.
(7)  There might be sort of a sense of "want to" in some cases.  The
British who don't have /r/ after vowels have the same difficulty that
you might have in pronouncing the fricative sound that used to be
present in night, through etc.  In many areas, it is just foreign.
And in the areas where they still pronounce /r/ in these positions,
doing so is looked at as sounding like a British equivalent of Gomer
Pyle or Forrest Gump, with all the connotations, if not like Long
John Silver.  I went to grad school with a guy from Plymouth,
England, where they DO pronounce /r/'s, and when he went to undergrad
at U. of Nottingham (where they don't), he could hardly say a word
without someone going "OO-AARRRR" at him, talking about combine
harvesters (thanks to a 1970's popular song sung by a group using
this kind of accent) and drinking "zoiderrr vrom Zomerzet" --he was
just looked at as a hick.  So to a lot of Britishers, even in his
area, /r/ in these positions is not a consonant.
There are plenty of Americans (including my own New York parents) who
had difficulty with /r/ in these positions.
(8)  But no, they can't say "awe" if they want to, not without
training, not if the merger is complete, any more than you or I could
say Chaucer's vowel in "beat" (a long version of the vowel in "bet")
easily.  It's just foreign.
I'd recommend the book "Language Myths" by Laurie Bauer and Peter
Trudgill.  It's British, but it deals with some of the matters you
bring up, is not too technical, and gets the points across.

Paul Johnston


Paul Johnston
On Sep 30, 2006, at 10:02 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: ah/ awe
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
>> From: "Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU>
>>>
>> Suggesting that people with this vowel merger "are flat out
>> refusing to =
>> say the phoneme 'awe'" makes about as much sense as claiming that
>> these =
>> same people are refusing to say the fricative phoneme
>> corresponding to =
>> the <gh> in night, naughty, ought, etc. The truth is these sounds
>> are =
>> not part of the phonemic inventory of these speakers (or of the
>> vast =
>> majority of speakers in the latter case). Normally we don't get to =
>> choose our phonemic inventories. So, it's just wrong to think that =
>> merged speakers somehow have a choice of whether to deploy the
>> 'awe' =
>> phoneme and choose to reject it.=20
>>
>
> To my ears it's not a merger between "ah" and "awe" it's a
> substitution of
> "ah" for "awe" and a dropping of the "awe" phoneme altogether.
>
> What does it mean to say the sound "awe" is not in their
> inventory?  Is this
> something like "r" dropping in UK.  Certainly they can say the "r"
> if they
> want.  They just don't want to.  Most likely because it's not in
> vogue in
> their geographic area dialect.  But certainly they hear it on TV
> and can say
> "awe" if they want to.
>
> My thinking is that "ah" is easier to say than "awe" so it's
> substituted for
> "awe".  I hear folks that never have made that substitution before,
> making
> it now.  It's on TV, It's everywhere.  I wonder if it's a Spanish
> influence.
>
> On a philosophic note I'd rather pronounce the "k" in "knot" and
> "p" in
> "pneumonia" to keep pronunciaiton closer to spelling.  This is a
> reading
> problem.  Not good to go the other way, such as  changing the
> pronunciation
> from "awe" to "ah" and creating heteronyms and possible understanding
> problems and phonics confusions.
>
> Tom Z
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org