hawk/hock

[Erin McKean]

I hope this is not redundant -- I'm checking my mail remotely and may not
have gotten to all the ADS-L hawk messages hidden among the porn and
weight loss spams...

But, to answer Dennis, I was reading the June issue of WIRED yesterday
evening and found this sentence in an article about Filipino workers
overseas:

"Often a new contract, written in a foreign language, is forced on the
employee once she's in hawk for her fees and far away from home." (p. 145)

--Erin McKean
editor at verbatimmag.com

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

> Is there a merger of the words anywhere (i.e., people who confuse
> "pawning" with "bird of prey"?
>
> dInIs
>
>
>
>
> >Yes, it did sound a lot like "hock" when he pronounced "Muncie Hawk
> >Shop."  I don't think there's any merger of the words here, though,
> >just of the pronunciation.
> >
> >John Baker
> >
> >
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Beverly Flanigan [mailto:flanigan at ohio.edu]
> >Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 3:56 PM
> >To: American Dialect Society
> >Cc: Baker, John
> >Subject: Re: hawk/hock
> >
> >
> >Did you ask the owner to pronounce the name of the shop? He may say [hak]
> >(with 'short o') for both words even if he has the lexical distinction. I
> >have a similar example somewhere in my files, where "hawk" seems to be the
> >clear intention but "hock" is on the sign (or in the ad); in this case the
> >two words seem to have merged along with the vowels.
> >
> >On the other hand, in southern and SE Ohio (all the way to Pittsburgh) the
> >opposite conflation will occur, with both vowels going to [O](or 'open o').
> >(I should say "almost," since the merged vowel is not quite that far back.)
> >Newcomers to our area who hear the name of our local river may thus spell
> >it "Hawking" instead of "Hocking." When I myself was new, a neighbor asked
> >my son if he liked to play "hawkey," and we didn't know what he was talking
> >about for some time.
>
> --
> Dennis R. Preston
> Professor of Linguistics
> Department of Linguistics and Languages
> 740 Wells Hall A
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
> Office - (517) 353-0740
> Fax - (517) 432-2736
>