ah/ awe

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:47 AM +0000 10/3/06, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>Most folks pronounce them the same according to Bert Vaux's survey.  There
>is a distribution map also at.
>
>http://www3.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html
>
>15. How do you pronounce Mary/merry/marry?
>     a. all 3 are the same (56.88%)
>     b. all 3 are different (17.34%)
>     c. Mary and merry are the same; marry is different (8.97%)
>     d. merry and marry are the same; Mary is different (0.96%)
>     e. Mary and marry are the same; merry is different (15.84%)
>     (11422 respondents)
>
>I wonder how it is possible for people to answer any of Bert Vaux's
>questions if they are deaf to the differences as some people here say.  They
>apparently are not.
>
>Tom Z

I may not follow the logic of the query, but I suspect it's a
question of not being blind to the difference in the orthography
rather than not being deaf to the difference in the pronunciation.
People who pronounce the three words the same do still spell them
differently.  If I can understand and answer the question "Do you
pronounce "bear" and "bare" the same?" (I would answer it "yes", as
would every other English speaker I'm aware of), does this show that
we're "really" not deaf to the differences in pronunciation that
we've somehow collectively retained from Middle English?

LH

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