ah/ awe

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Tom:
Speaking as a native US English speaker who has the merger (i.e. who has the same vowel in 'cot' and 'caught' etc.), I can confirm that the difficulty of undoing the merger. It's not that I can't make the 'awe' sound, rather it's that I have no need for it since it does not function as a distinctive sound (distinctive from the 'ah') in my phonology. More to your point, I have phonetic training and study pronunciation professionally, and I'm not confident that I could fake having the 'awe - ah' distinction for more than a few minutes even if I tried. I might remember to use 'awe' in some words, but I wouldn't be able to deploy it consistently without thinking over my sentences ahead of time.

Here's another analogy for you. According to your truespel system ( http://www.truespel.com/phonemes2.html ), it seems you do not have a phonemic distinction between the initial consonants in 'where' and 'wear'. Do you think you could learn to make such a distinction and use the 'wh' sound consistently in your natural speech? FWIW, in my research I occasionally interview people who have been exposed to the wh/w distinction by teachers (usually in theater classes) and none of these people uses the 'wh' sound except when asked to read a minimal pair like 'where' and 'wear'. So, I have my doubts about anyone's ability to undo this or any merger. In fact, the 'wh/w' merger should be relatively simple to undo because it's so clearly and consistently marked orthographically unlike the 'cot/caught' merger  for which each phoneme has a variety of spellings.

-Matt Gordon

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Tom Zurinskas
Sent: Sun 10/1/2006 4:16 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: ah/ awe
 

For native USA English speakers not to be able to say the sound "awe"
without training is not conceivable to me.  Even if the "merger" ie.
replacement of "awe" by "ah" is complete in their dialect.  Got data on
this?

Tom Z

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