ah/ awe

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Suggesting that people with this vowel merger "are flat out refusing to say the phoneme 'awe'" makes about as much sense as claiming that these same people are refusing to say the fricative phoneme corresponding to the <gh> in night, naughty, ought, etc. The truth is these sounds are not part of the phonemic inventory of these speakers (or of the vast majority of speakers in the latter case). Normally we don't get to choose our phonemic inventories. So, it's just wrong to think that merged speakers somehow have a choice of whether to deploy the 'awe' phoneme and choose to reject it. 


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Tom Zurinskas
Sent: Sat 9/30/2006 4:14 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: ah/ awe
 
What appears to be
happening is that some folks are flat out refusing to say the phoneme "awe".
  Words like "off" "talk" "awe" "all" "gone", are all spoken with "ah", and
"awe" is gone (gahn).  Not good.

Tom Z


See truespel.com and the 4 truespel books at authorhouse.com.

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