ah/ awe

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:50 PM +0000 10/2/06, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>>From: David Bowie <db.list at PMPKN.NET>
>>>
>>From:    Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
>>>>  From: sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM>
>>
>>>>  Tom, would you wipe out all dialectal differences in pursuit of this
>>>>  pronounce-as-spelled campaign?  How would you deal, e.g., with the
>>>>  diphthongal i with which most northerners pronounce /light, sight,
>>might/,
>>>>  &c?
>>
>>>  I'm not familiar with that dipthong.  In m-w.com those words above do
>>not
>>>  have vowels that are two-phthongs to me.
>>
>>The standard pronunciations of the vowels in those words are
>>diphthongs--in fact, pronouncing those vowels with monophthongs is
>>rather markedly non-standard. I'm starting to become very curious as to
>>where your assumptions about the technicalities of English pronunciation
>>come from.
>
>My assumptions are my own.  Are your assumptions someone elses?  Hwo's
>(Sorry that's "who's", I'm practicing saying "wh" as "hw") are they?.

The point on "who" is that nobody anywhere pronounces it /hwu/ (or
/wu/), only as /hu/.  I guess this would be anathema to the alphabet
principal, though, since it's spelled the same as the other "wh"
words that come out /hw/ in the relevant dialects.

>   Words
>/light, sight, might/ have one phthong as I hear them in m-w.com.
>
Um, no.  I just checked and they're all definitely diphthongs (or
two-phthongs if you insist), with a vowel nucleus beginning with /a/
and ending with /i/.  For them to be monophthongs, they'd be
homonymous with "lot", "sot", and "mott" as you've indicated you
pronounce the latter set of words ("ah", not "awe").  They are indeed
pronounced that way in some areas of the southern U.S., but not by
the m-w.com sot...er, site.

LH

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