ah/ awe

[Alice Faber]

Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>> 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.

But it *is* a merger, by the definition of a merger. One language state
with two contrasting sounds develops into a state in which there is only
one.

>> (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.

Maybe, maybe not. It's common for folks who haven't studied sound change
extensively to appeal to "ease of articulation" as an account both for
particular sound changes and for sound change in general. The problem is
that it's impossible to predict in advance which sound combinations are
so difficult as to be susceptible of change.
>
>> (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?

The canonical argument is that reform of English spelling would make it
harder for speakers who learned a reformed spelling to read classics of
the past. "How would they read Shakespeare?"
>
>> (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?

I think the collected experience of the linguists in this group of
teaching beginning students phonetic transcription and dialectology
counts for something more than your untutored intuitions. Furthermore,
studies of second language and second dialect acquisition show quite
clearly that learners, especially those beyond their primary school
years, have substantially difficulty learning to make linguistic use of
sounds not used in their native speech variety. Sure, they can learn to
mimic the sound AWE, but they'll likely have difficulty producing it in
running speech. And, if they don't distinguish the COT and CAUGHT
classes of words in their own speech, even if they can learn to
pronounce the two sounds differently, they'll inevitably make many
errors in correctly assigning words to the COT and CAUGHT classes.

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber
faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203)
865-8963

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