[ADS-L] saying "ah" for "awe"

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Linguists call this "cot/caught" merger. It has been going on a long time. It 
depends, though, on what "neck of the woods one is in." Mergers are a normal 
part of human linguistic change. Note that "knot" and "not" used to be 
pronounced the same way, but nobody pronounces the "k" any more. Likewise "which" and 
"witch" for most people, and "pin" and "pen" for many people.

Most linguists will see a problem with your our statement that certain words 
"initially were meant to be spoken differently": "meant" by whom or what? But 
it is certainly true that many words were "initially spoken differently" by 
many speakers and are now pronounced the same.

These mergers rarely create a communication problem, and since the process 
seems to be inevitable, it probably is not anything to worry about. As a 
scientific phenomenon, however, merger is certainly interesting, and social and reg
ional dialectologists are constantly monitoring the situation.

There is a lot of information available online concering social and regional 
variation in American English, and if you do a bit of search-engine hunting, 
you can find a lot of information about all of these phenomena.


In a message dated 9/30/06 11:49:32 AM, truespel at HOTMAIL.COM writes:


> I'm hearing the phoneme "ah" substituted for "awe" all the time now.  
> What's
> going on.  Is it a fad or what?  Not good.  It gets away from phonic form
> consistency and creates words that sound alike but are spelled differently,
> mean different things, and initially were meant to be spoken differently,
> like "cot" and "caught", "tock" and "talk".
> 
> How is it in your neck of the woods?
> 
> Tom Z
> 

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