/or/ distinctions and more

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:14 AM -0400 4/13/00, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>But what
>about 'sorry'?  It used to rhyme with 'sore' for me but doesn't now (except
>in the idiom "a sorry mess"), though it still does (I think) for my
>Minnesota family.  Come to think of it, it may now be [sari] for my brother
>too.  Kid words which are also very high-frequency in adult discourse may
>be more susceptible to change, I suspect--any thoughts on this?  A complex
>picture indeed!
>
I grew up with the New Yorker's [ar] for all of these (that is, low
relatively back unrounded, as in CAR), but when I went to college in
upstate New Yorker, I became self-conscious enough to adapt to the
indigenous [or] (as in SORE, with open o/backward c) in such words as
"forest", "moral", "orange", "Oregon", and especially "corridor"--after my
KAH-r at -dor pronunciation got mocked once too often for my comfort.  I
mostly still use the SORE vowel for these words (although it's somewhat
variable), but I don't think I ever switched over on "sorry".  I'm not sure
what determined this, other than the shibboleth status of "corridor" and,
to a lesser extent, "orange".  Anyway, it's interesting that others might
have shifted in the opposite (or-->ar) direction.

larry