ah/ awe

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:17 AM -0400 10/2/06, David Bowie wrote:
>From:    Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
>
><snip>
>
>>Enjoy using the poem, Beverly,  Try out this test for me.
>
>>For a person that says "ah" for "awe" for a particular word ask
>>him/her if he/she can hear the difference when you say that word both
>>ways.  I predict for native USA speakers brought up on TV and radio,
>>that they will say yes, they hear the difference.  Then ask them to
>>speak the word using both ways. I'll bet they can do that too.  Then
>>ask them why they use "ah" and they'll say That's the way we say it
>>around their neck of the woods.  You might want to use the same word
>>each time and a recording to standardize the stimulus.
>
>Actually, given my own experience working with people's perceptions of
>completed mergers, i can emphatically state that you are wrong in your
>predictions--people from areas where the cot-caught merger is completed
>will neither hear nor produce the difference, and even if they manage to
>imitate it once or twice, that'll be an essentially random result, since
>they'll get it the other way around just as often.
>
>In fact, if you have a completed merger that isn't socially salient--as
>is the case for the cot-caught merger most places it exists--people
>won't even explain it by saying anything remotely like "That's the way
>we say it around [our] neck of the woods." Rather, people will look at
>you like you've sprouted a third head or something, to have asked them
>something so utterly weird.
>
That's certainly the reaction I get when I try to convince non-New
Yorkers that it's nice to differentiate "Mary"/"merry"/"marry".  Of
course they probably just figure New Yorkers have third heads anyway.
(Now, of course most of those non-New Yorkers will agree with me that
"Murray" is distinct from the vowel sounds in the above words--except
that for them it's distinct from the vowel sound (sg.) in those words.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org