Why

[Dennis R. Preston]

arnold,

dInIs also notes that "wharf" and "Whorf" are pretty clearly words
learned after his vernacular was well-entrenched, and he probably
first heard these words pronounced by flatlander conflaters.

This qausi-developmental phoneme classification is clearest in my
speech as regards the cot-caught distinction (which I have
well-preserved) when it comes to classifying those two phonemes,
especially before /g/. All my childhood words (fog, hog, dog, frog,
log, etc...) have the vowel of "caught"; later-learned words are
often invariably that of "cot": togs, cog, clog, bog, jog, etc... . I
seem to have learned metaphoric (verbal) "bog" before the literal
noun. Therefore, I have a variable "bog down" (=become mired in) with
both vowels - but now early-morning introspection begins to fail me.

dInIs



>sagehen adds WHO to WHOA and exclamatory WHY.  but WHO(M)/WHOSE
>all have initial h, not w, so they're not involved in the
>relationships we've been talking about.
>
>
>dInIs adds (for him) WHORF and WHARF.  both of these can have
>initial voiceless consonants for me.  but i'd certainly expect
>plenty of words to have moved into the voiced-only set for
>other speakers; after all, i have voiced initials as possible
>variants for all the voiceless-initial words.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

--
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