saying "ah" for "awe"

[Tom Zurinskas]

Dear Paul,

Thanks for the history.  Sounds pretty grim for phoneme "awe'.  If there is
no concerted effort to save it, it will be "merged" out of existence in USA
if trends continue.  We'll have to correct our dictionaries and toss (tahs)
"awe" out.  It will be a big break with UK, which is not merging as USA is.
There will be a lot more heteronyms, hawk/hock, caulk/cock, caller/collar,
talk/tock, caught/cot, walk/wok, naught/not, naughty/knotty, bawdy/body,
Maude/mod, awe/ah, raw/rah, law/la, paw/pa, saught/sot, wrought/rot,
Dawn/Don, auto/Otto, Paul/poll and then some.

If linguists won't fight to save "awe", who will?

Tom Z



>From: Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
>
>Dear Tom,
>But they ARE using their knowledge of phonics.  We could get into a
>debate on this--but let's assume phonics is the way to go in teaching
>reading & spelling.  We have a problem--our spelling system is keyed
>roughly to the English of about, say, 1400.  A lot of things--
>perfectly accepted things--have caused homonyms like road & rowed.
>And even awe was written like that, and not, say, oo or oa, because
>at that time it was pronounced roughly like we say ow (or owa), and
>according to good, 1500-year-old conventions of using our Latin
>alphabet, the combination of letters <au> or <aw> designated the "ow"
>sound.  It later changed to what we say now, and the people you have
>complained about have carried it even further.  All the phonics
>teaching in the world--or ANY schooling--can only retard change.  In
>the face of things like this, a teacher is like King Canute telling
>the tide to go out.  It just doesn't work.  Many people want to sound
>like people who they identify with.  That can be a teacher.  It CAN'T
>be a book.  But it is usually their parents, their neighbors and
>their peers.  Sorry 'bout that--it's been that way forever.
>
>
>Paul Johnston
>On Oct 1, 2006, at 1:16 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: saying "ah" for "awe"
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ---------
> >
> >> From: Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> >> Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> >> Subject: Re: saying "ah" for "awe"
> >> Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 11:01:40 -0400
> >>
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >> -----------------------
> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> >> Subject:      Re: saying "ah" for "awe"
> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> ----------
> >>
> >> Dear Tom,
> >> As far as the distribution, the COT=CAUGHT merger is a phenomenon of
> >> vowel change that linguists have explored a lot.  It occurs in
> >> several areas:  (1) parts of Eastern New England; (2) Western
> >> Pennsylvania and adjoining areas; (3) most of the West--though in
> >> some cases, the vowels are just very close, not actually merged;  (4)
> >> some areas adjoining Canada, where the merger is usual; and (5) a
> >> growing tail of dialects running from Central Ohio through the center
> >> of the country connecting (3) and (2).  In (1), (3), most of (5), and
> >> sometimes  (4), it tends to be the COT vowel that survives, though
> >> (1)'s COT vowel sounds like a lot  of American's CAUGHT vowel.
> >> OK--people have been saying what you've said about confusing word
> >> meanings and so on for at least 400 years.  I know of grammarians in
> >> the early 17th century on how disgusting it was to pronounce tail and
> >> tale, or main and mane, or road and rowed, or no and know the same.
> >> (The spelling shows that they were once different, and they still are
> >> in a number of British dialects).  Yet we accept their merger today
> >> as Standard, and  learn their spelling individually,  because our
> >> phonics rules don't quite work here.  Same with knight and night,
> >> rights and rites, and so on.  No one confuses their meaning because
> >> these words are not spoken in isolation--they are in sentences, and
> >> these sentences in texts and conversations.  So we can determine the
> >> meaning by the words they are around--their context.  So, although it
> >> may make it harder for kids to learn to spell using phonics alone,
> >> our language still functions--and if there is confusion, you can
> >> always ask what was meant.
> >>
> >> Paul Johnston
> >
> > Personnally, if language is given to change, I would prefer it to
> > be more
> > phonetically consistent with spelling.  What you say is that we
> > have no way
> > to influence this.  I think we have a way - our school systems.  The
> > dropping of phonics was a bad thing.  Now "phonemic awareness" is
> > back.  A
> > good thing.
> >
> > Tom z
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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