saying "ah" for "awe"

[Paul Johnston]

Don't worry, Tom.  New Yorkers will never succumb, for one.

Paul Johnston
On Oct 2, 2006, at 1:33 AM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: saying "ah" for "awe"
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> 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
>>>
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