-og words

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 01:04 PM 6/17/02 -0400, you wrote:
>here's verification of Charles's speech from another Atlantan.
>
>only 'dog' has the vowel of 'caught' for me, of the -og words.
>I don't have the merger otherwise, i.e. don't use /a/ in all, straw,
>bought, but some of my students do.  some think it sounds funny
>though.  they are mostly from metro atlanta.
>...
>and 'got' does indeed have the (monophthongal) vowel of 'ride', and seems
>to be an anomaly among    -ot words for me too.  for those who are not
>native southerners, you should know that this is a FRONT vowel, not the
>low back 'ah' sound as it is often caricatured, intentionally or not.
>
>Ellen

I learned this last lesson from Natalie Maynor, who corrected my
monophthongizing of /ai/. I naively used low-back 'script a' and she said
"No no, it's [a], i.e., 'print a', not higher but farther front.


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Charles Wells [mailto:charles at FREUDE.COM]
>Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 11:38 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: -og words
>
>
>I say "dog" with the caught vowel and all other -og words with the cob
>vowel (not distinguished in my Atlanta-based dialect from the a in father).
>  Like Alice Faber, I was bothered as a child by verse that rhymed dog with
>other words.
>
>I also noticed when I was young that we said "got" differently from other
>-ot words, so got and hot don't rhyme; the vowel in "got" is higher, and is
>the same except for length as the monophthong in "ride".  (I say "right" as
>a diphthong, however.)  Thus this short vowel occurs in exactly one word in
>my dialect, except when I am imitating hillbillies.  I understand that this
>feature of the Atlanta dialect has been noticed by linguists.  Does that
>mean it is an extra phoneme?
>
>Charles Wells

I don't understand why you'd use the fronted 'print a' when imitating
hillbillies.  Just which hillbillies do you have in mind?  Southern Ohio
"hillbillies" don't monophthongize to [a]; they use a farther back
semi-rounded vowel, midway between 'script a' (ah) and 'backward C' (O, to
use the symbol previous writers have used).  And this may indeed be an
extra phoneme in this area, as it is in Pittsburgh and western PA and
eastern Canada (not to mention England).



_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm