Will that be pop, soda or a soft drink?

[Matthew Gordon]

On the American "praw-gres": my guess is that this transcription results
from the 'cot/caught' merger, which is nearly universal in Canadian
English. Thus, the 'aw' spelling stands for both the 'o' of 'cot' and
the 'au' of 'caught'.
If they had transcriped it as "pra-gress" this might be misinterpreted
as /ae/.

As for 'pasta', maybe the author noted that the American pronunciation
differed from the Canadian, which has something like /ae/ for both
syllables, but noticed only the second syllable as having /a/; thus
assuming Americans say /paesta/. Just a guess.

Laurence Horn wrote:

> Problems with transcription, perhaps, but...
>
> At 7:53 AM -0800 3/15/03, vida morkunas wrote:
>
>> Will that be pop, soda or a soft drink?
>>
>> http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030315/FCLANG/
>>
>> What you say is what you are, reports STEPHEN COLE. If you want
>> 'icing,' not
>> 'frosting,' on your cake, you're definitely Canadian
>>
>> By STEPHEN COLE
>>  UPDATED AT 10:53 AM EST  Saturday, Mar. 15, 2003
>> ...
>> "I'm a dual citizen and chameleon," he says. "I fit in linguistically
>> wherever I go."
>>
>> Which means, in Canada, he looks for a "shed'yool" to determine the
>> "pro-gres" of trains to the city, where he might have pasta (short a)
>> at a
>> restaurant. In the States, however, he'd be saying "skej-oo-al,"
>> "praw-gres"
>> and "past-ah."
>
>
> ...I have no idea what to make of this.  Past-ah?  Is the claim that
> in Canada "pasta" is pronounced basically as in Italian while in the
> States the first syllable is essentially "pass" or as in "(I'm) past
> i(t)", with an /ae/?  What part of the States would that be?    I
> also wondered about the "praw-gres", which doesn't seem like
> something I've heard--I'm more familiar with an [a] vowel here,
> different indeed from the Canadian and British /o/, but not in the
> way indicated, but I would expect that to differ as the open-o vs.
> /a/ distinction typically does.
>
>>
>> Mr. Boberg's recent "lexical" survey,
>
>
> funny scare quotes, suggesting that there's another, REAL kind of
> lexical survey.  Or that this is a slang use of "lexical".
>
>>
>
> larry
>