the long and the short of it

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 07:35 PM 3/17/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>At 4:09 PM -0800 3/17/03, FRITZ JUENGLING wrote:
>>  >>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 03/17/03 03:22PM >>>
>>At 6:11 PM -0500 3/17/03, David Bergdahl wrote:
>>
>>>We didn't have those, but I thought "short o" was the vowel of "dog"
>>>and "laundry" as opposed to that of "log", "frog", and "father".
>>>Hard to remember, though.
>>>larry
>>
>>Those are all the same for me.
>>Fritz
>
>Right, but for those who round the vowel of "dog" but not that of the
>other words in the group, it makes a certain kind of sense to retain
>the name "short o" for the rounded open-o vowel of "dog", while using
>some "a" vowel label (but not "long a!") for the unrounded one in
>"log", "father", etc.  I remember college dictionaries using the
>a-with-two-dots-on-it (formally, but not functionally, an umlaut) for
>that one, and an o-with-a-breve for the "dog" vowel, usually with a
>note somewhere about variation.  Or maybe the dictionaries used the
>o-breve for "log" and "frog" too, and included a note to the effect
>that some speakers (like me) pronounce those words with the
>a-double-dot-on-top.
>
>larry

If you distinguish 'dog' and 'father', the former is called "open o" (or
'backward C') now, but I don't think schoolbooks and dictionaries used that
term, did they?  I also don't think schools and dicts use "broad A" and
"flat A" anymore; I associate these with earlier books like Mencken's,
where I assume the New England [a] in 'laugh' and 'past' was what was meant
by "broad A", and the aesh [ae] usage in those words was "flat
A"--right?  In a neat 1878 piece I've quoted in an entry for the
_Enclyclopedia of Appalachia_ (due out soon, I believe), New England and
Virginia are said to have "the Italian sound of the vowel 'a' (the
"suppressed sound of the letter 'r'" is also noted there); this is
contrasted with "the narrower sound 'a' ... and a fuller consonantal sound
of 'r'."  Models for the distinction are 'far' and 'fat'.  "Father," of
course, is not at issue, which is why I cite it as the keyword in the
lexical set with [a] instead of "palm," which is what J.C. Wells uses (that
could have open O in many dialects, including mine).  But by [a] I mean
"script a", farther back than  print [a] but not the slightly rounded
"turned script a."  Ugh!

All of this illustrates, again, the value of using strict IPA, if only we
could have it in our e-mail formats!