Raleigh, N.C. -- awesome or aw-dropping?

Michael Newman Michael.Newman at QC.CUNY.EDU
Sat Feb 15 03:40:36 UTC 2014


ACtually, I’m capable of saying fog and bog with THOUGHT, although I’m pretty sure I vary. (which in turns also rhymes sometimes with airy and sometimes with sorry)



Michael Newman
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Communication Disorders
Queens College/CUNY

mnewman at qc.cuny.edu

On Feb 14, 2014, at 10:11 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Raleigh, N.C. -- awesome or aw-dropping?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Feb 14, 2014, at 9:45 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Cf. HOG and DOG.
>>>>
>>>> JL
>>>
>>> Right.  I think we discussed these a while back.  For me (NYC, b. 1945), nothing rhymes with "dog" but "blawg".
>>
>> On the pronunciation of "blog" vs. "blawg", see my Language Log post of 1/24/06:
>>
>> ----
>> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002780.html
>> For speakers with the cot-caught merger of low back vowels (such as
>> most residents of the western U.S.), the vowel in _blog_ merges with
>> the vowel in _law_, with the result that _blawg_ is homonymous with
>> _blog_. Speakers without the merger tend to use the _cot_ vowel for
>> most words ending in _-og_, with the exception of _dog_ and
>> occasionally other common words. _Blog_ is not (yet!) common enough to
>> be subject to this lexical diffusion and thus remains distinct from
>> _blawg_ for most speakers lacking the merger.
>> ----
>>
>> I don't think "blog" has become common enough in the intervening six
>> years to join the "dog" class for us non-mergerers.
>>
> Is there anything else in your "dog" class?  As noted, I don't have anything in mine, however common--other than "blawg", which is quite un-, and which of course qualifies for membership in the class only as a spelling pronunciation.  It doesn't seem as though frequency really plays a role for me, except perhaps for the fact that "dog" is more frequent than any of its non-rhyming rivals. Do other NYCers share this intuition?
>
> LH
>
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