oxen / dachshund

[Matthew Gordon]

I agree with Larry's diagnosis. They both have a low back (unrounded)
vowel, which is true for most American dialects. Maybe Bostonians have a
rounded vowel in 'oxen' and an unrounded one in 'dachshund'; is that right?

As for the /ae/, if the commercial were filmed in Michigan or other
places where the Northern Cities Shift operates, you would indeed get
something closer to /ae/ in both words.

I'm not sure what you're thinking about in your comments on the /ay/ and
the Southern Shift. There is no /ay/ in 'oxen' or 'dachshund' - maybe
you're thinking about "Ay, chihuahua!"

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??
>
>-Mai
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