oxen / dachshund

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 02:00 PM 2/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>At 1:36 PM -0600 2/12/03, Mai Kuha wrote:
>>In one of Sprint's most recent TV ads, the Sprint PCS guy comes to the
>>rescue of a farmer who had ordered 200 oxen using a low quality cell phone
>>with static, so the order was misunderstood and 200 dachshund were
>>delivered. It finally hit me that "200 oxen" and "200 dachshund" aren't just
>>close, but actually identical in the ad, because the actor playing the
>>farmer pronounces the first vowel of "oxen" as "ae" (the vowel of "bad"), or
>>something close to it. Am I hearing that correctly? (These American English
>>vowels still throw me for a loop after all these years.) ...and if "oxen"
>>does have "ae", is that an example of a regional feature? possibly the
>>fronting of the nucleus of "ay", which some researchers include in the
>>Southern Vowel Shift??
>I'll have to listen for it next time the ad comes on (I'm always
>distracted by the lassoing scene), but I'd have thought you could
>neutralize the distinction more easily by pronouncing both of them
>(oxen, dachshund) with a back [a] rather than a front [ae].  Of
>course, if the farmer had ordered 200 dachshund, he'd have received
>200 hot dogs along with an authentic T.A.D. Dorgan souvenir cartoon
>napkin.
>
>larry

This was my first silent pronunciation too, following the German for
'dachshund' (but of course there'd be a plural -s even in Germanized
English).  But rather than the Southern Shift, what Mai probably heard was
the Northern Shift, with /a/ moving forward to /ae/, as in Detroit,
Chicago, etc.  Labov's classic example is "locks" on a dam sounding like
"lax" in Chicago, and I elicited a perfect "White Sax" from a Chicago taxi
driver on a recent trip there.   So "oxen" would become [aeks at n], more or less.