ah/ awe

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

It seems to me language learners (I assume you're talking about L2 learners of English if you're worried about spelling) would have a much easier time of things acquiring the merged system. Besides the obvious point that it's easier to learn one phoneme than two, it may be especially easier for most people coming to English as a second language to avoid having to learn 'awe' since that vowel is fairly rare (compared to 'ah') crosslinguistically. Moreover the spelling here is a mess. Not only are there multiple spellings associated with each phoneme, the same spellings are sometimes used for 'ah' words and sometimes for 'awe' (e.g. <o> is usually 'ah' but is 'awe' in "on", "long", "dog" and some other words for some speakers; <al> is 'awe' in "fall" but may be 'ah' in "balm"; the <a> of "Chicago> is 'awe' for some people and 'ah' for others). It seems to me it'd be a lot easier to learn a single vowel for these spellings as well as the others (i.e. <aw>, <au>, etc).

If you're worried about disadvantaging second-language learners by teaching them a deficient version of English, relax. I have lived a pretty productive life without the 'awe' vowel. This merger is not stigmatized even in those parts of the country (probably the majority in terms of area) where it is actively spreading.


>From: Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIO.EDU>

>Give it up, Tom--it won't work!  The scholarly research by linguists on all
>this is very clear and has been cited by many of us.

I'm sorry.  Don't know what I should be giving up.  Is it the quest to have
linguists unite in trying to get folks to say "awe" for forms "au" and "aw"
which in recent tradition were spoken "awe"?  Basically it's a quest to
retain what we can of the alphabetic principal.  This is important for
language learners.  Studies have been interpreted to show that it's the
deviation from the alphabetic principal that is "causing" 50% of the
dyslexia in Englsih.

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