ah/ awe

[Jonathan Lighter]

Such subjective distinctions can be tricky for anyone.  I've always distinguished "Mary," "merry," and "marry."  When I took a history of English course with a prof from Baltimore (who had had to learn the distinction between "Mary" and "merry" specially), he insisted that I pronounced those two quite alike.

  How do I know I'm not like those people who think "awl" is different from "awl" ?
  Because other New Yorkers can spell what I'm saying with 100% accuracy.

  BTW, I think this would be a better world if more people would continue to observe the distinction between the past perfect and the simple past ("had had to" vs. "had to") as they did in the Golden Age of English (a period of seven minutes one night in 1602), but they just won't listen to me.

  JL

  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: ah/ awe
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At 10:17 AM -0400 10/2/06, David Bowie wrote:
>From: Tom Zurinskas
>
>
>
>>Enjoy using the poem, Beverly, Try out this test for me.
>
>>For a person that says "ah" for "awe" for a particular word ask
>>him/her if he/she can hear the difference when you say that word both
>>ways. I predict for native USA speakers brought up on TV and radio,
>>that they will say yes, they hear the difference. Then ask them to
>>speak the word using both ways. I'll bet they can do that too. Then
>>ask them why they use "ah" and they'll say That's the way we say it
>>around their neck of the woods. You might want to use the same word
>>each time and a recording to standardize the stimulus.
>
>Actually, given my own experience working with people's perceptions of
>completed mergers, i can emphatically state that you are wrong in your
>predictions--people from areas where the cot-caught merger is completed
>will neither hear nor produce the difference, and even if they manage to
>imitate it once or twice, that'll be an essentially random result, since
>they'll get it the other way around just as often.
>
>In fact, if you have a completed merger that isn't socially salient--as
>is the case for the cot-caught merger most places it exists--people
>won't even explain it by saying anything remotely like "That's the way
>we say it around [our] neck of the woods." Rather, people will look at
>you like you've sprouted a third head or something, to have asked them
>something so utterly weird.
>
That's certainly the reaction I get when I try to convince non-New
Yorkers that it's nice to differentiate "Mary"/"merry"/"marry". Of
course they probably just figure New Yorkers have third heads anyway.
(Now, of course most of those non-New Yorkers will agree with me that
"Murray" is distinct from the vowel sounds in the above words--except
that for them it's distinct from the vowel sound (sg.) in those words.

LH

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