vowels...

[David Bowie]

From:    "Aaron E. Drews" <aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK>

: I'm curious.  Does anybody merge _bull_ and _bowl_, _pull_ and
: _pole_ (I forget if I've asked this before some years ago)?  I
: know I make such a merger, and I attributed it to the /l/).
: But I seem to have a different merger than the rest of the
: West.... and I had this merger *before* I moved to Scotland
: (where they don't distinguish _look_ from _Luke_ regardless of
: a following /l/).

<BEGIN shameless self-promotion>My dissertation deals with this merger in
Southern Maryland in some detail.<END shameless self-promotion> It appears
that there's mergers of _pull_ and _pole_, and _pull_ and _pool_ that have
nearly progressed to completion in the youngest speakers (after going
through periods of near-merger. There's a near-merger of /pole/ and /pool/
that's just getting underway in the youngest speakers, as well.

One thing that i've seen sporadically there but haven't looked at properly
is an occasionally merger of _dull_ and _pull_.

In all of these cases, where there's a merger in production, the target is
[U]. The four vowels *only* merge before /l/; the distinctions are
consistently and vigorously maintained otherwise.

David Bowie                                       Department of English
Assistant Professor                            Brigham Young University
db.list at pmpkn.net              http://humanities.byu.edu/faculty/bowied
   The opinions stated here are not necessarily those of my employer