ah/ awe

[Tom Zurinskas]

>From: Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
>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.
Seems  like unclear semantics.  The total replacement of one sound by
another does not seem like a merger.

>(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.
Seems to me "r" dropping and "awe" replaced by "ah" are both easier to say.

>(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.
Tradition?

>(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.
Indeed.

>(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.
I've often said it "pee-neumonia" :)  No problem with understanding.

>(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.
Some would say "r" saying is "hick", other that "r" dropping is "pompous."

>(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.
For native USA English speakers not to be able to say the sound "awe"
without training is not conceivable to me.  Even if the "merger" ie.
replacement of "awe" by "ah" is complete in their dialect.  Got data on
this?

Tom Z

>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

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