saying "ah" for "awe"

[Benjamin Barrett]

My mother is over 60 and I can guarantee you that she will never succumb
to plots to try and change her native American pronunciation. It's not a
merger for her or me and it has nothing to do with "saving" a sound
since it doesn't exist for us.

Studying Korean, I did finally learn to tell the difference somewhat,
though I still get the "oh" and the "c" sounds mixed up a significant
amount of the time when listening to Korean. In English, though, I've
never been able to figure it out even though it's my understanding that
lots of people who have migrated to Seattle do use the two sounds.

I *DO* hope that the dictionaries will be corrected to my dialect as you
suggest: Learning to read the pronunciation key with contradictory
examples and different symbols for the same sound was a difficult chore
as a child. I still have to work it out on occasion.

All the pairs you cite are the same for me except caulk/cock which
differ by the consonant "l" and Paul/poll which are "ah" and "oh",
respectively.

Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com

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"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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?
>

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