oxen / dachshund

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

I listened to the commercial thanks to the link Mai posted, and I didnt' think the /a/ was particularly frontish. It's definitely unrounded but nowhere close to /ae/ at least to my ears, and as someone blessed with the 'cot/caught' merger, I'm fairly sensitive to fronted /a/'s.

-----Original Message-----
From:   Beverly Flanigan [mailto:flanigan at OHIOU.EDU]
Sent:   Wed 2/12/2003 4:08 PM
To:     ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Cc:	
Subject:             Re: oxen / dachshund

At 02:45 PM 2/12/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>on 2/12/03 1:29 PM, Beverly Flanigan at flanigan at OHIOU.EDU wrote:
>
> > (...)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.
>
>The non-linguistic elements in the ad (hats, hay, bug belt buckles, horses
>snorting and high noon-type music in the background) kept me from thinking
>about the NCVS! If only Sprint had consulted a linguist, they could have
>gone with the alternate neutralization method that Larry suggested.
>
>-Mai

Yeah, I'd guess the actors came from the Inland North and had no idea they
didn't sound Western or Southern, and the Sprint ad writers didn't
either.  I, from the Far (cold) North, have [a] in both words, like our
Canadian friend.  But I'll listen again in case I missed something.  (Those
little dogies--oops, doggies--ARE distracting.)