Vitale

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 10:43 AM 9/23/2004, you wrote:
>At 10:20 AM -0400 9/23/04, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>>He (Dick Vitale) is most definitely not a Detroiter (not on
>>linguistic evidence at any rate). His open oh raising (so that
>>'caught' sounds like 'coat' or even 'coot') is much more typical of
>>NYC-area speech.
>
>"Caught" like "coat" or "coot"?  I'm not sure I follow this.  My
>"caught" is very different from my "cot", but it doesn't approach my
>"coat" or "coot".  I suppose it might approach others' "coat" or
>"coot", but I still don't quite get the phonetics here.  Maybe it's a
>diphthong that begins in the same place "coot" does and then breaks
>to a schwa, or something like that?
I usually use "coffee" and "chocolate" as more familiar exemplars of NYC
speech (as in Labov's reading passages for his NYC diss.).  The open oh
approaches /o/ but not quite, unlike my own, and maybe Larry's, "coat" /o/
(which is not the same here in SE Ohio).