rawk (1987)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Many New Yorkers notoriously have a vowel in "dog," "caught," etc., that is farther back than the "open-o" symbol usually suggests.

Despite this, when I personally demonstrate the phonemic difference between "cot" and "caught" for Southern undergrads most claim not to hear it, presumably because they don't make the distinction themselves. Most remain unable to transcribe the distinction correctly.

A well-known phenomenon, but it still impresses me.

Other contrasting pairs are "odd" & "awed," "mod" & "Maude," "Ol" [short for "Olivia"] & "all,"  "moll" & "maul," "Poll" & "Paul," "doll" & "Dall" [wild sheep of the Rockies]; and for less r-full speakers, "shod" & "shored," "hod" and "horde," "lard" & "lord," "r-full" and "awful."

JL

JL




David Bowie <db.list at PMPKN.NET> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: David Bowie
Subject: Re: rawk (1987)
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From: Laurence Horn
: At 10:55 AM -0600 2/24/05, Jim Parish wrote:

:: This spelling is also popular (AFAICT, more popular) for the verb
:: "rock", as in "You RAWK!", a rather vague but forceful expression of
:: praise.

: Wonder if there's an influence from the "hawg" spelling (201,000
: google hits, mostly for Harleys and such). Then there's "dawg" which
: I've always found curious, since that would be how I'd pronounce
: "dog" without any help. (Sort of like "luv" or "wuz", or "wimmin".)
: At least in the "rawk" and "hawg" case the distinct spelling does
: index a distinct pronunciation.

Provo (Utah) High School's mascot is the Bulldogs, and along the side of the
school is emblazoned "Go Dawgs!" However, this area has the cot-caught
merger.

My suspicion is that in this case (and likely others) it's imitation of the
Georgia Bulldogs, not an index of any particular pronunciation.

In a FWIW aside, i have the cot-caught distinction, and 'hog' and 'hawg' are
both pronounced the same for me. The words are notoriously variable;
for me there's dog, hog, slog, fog, frog, and log (open-o) versus blog, pog,
cog, jog, toggle, and noggin (ah).

David Bowie http://pmpkn.net/lx
Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.



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