Hockey

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 04:39 PM 5/19/2007, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
>Subject:      Re: Hockey
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>
> >southern Ohio has (roughly) the same kind of merger found in eastern
> >Canada, where the merger is toward 'caught'.  It's not fully open o
> >(=backward C) though but rather midway between /a/ (short o) and open
> >o--described in some circles as "turned script a."  Hence I hear "hockey"
> >as close to, but not identical with, "hawkey" all the time in this part of
> >Ohio.
>
>Hm. Up here in the northern wastelands, it's
>usually more like ordinary script a, not turned
>script a. That's even what's taught in
>linguistics courses in universities here, at
>least the ones I'm aware of, when Canadian
>English is described. The more forward [a] only
>occurs before i and r in this dialect, by the
>way, and I'm sometimes hearing that now as the
>script a too. (There is a slight but perceptible
>vowel shift in many younger speakers around here,
>especially females, I think, going in the
>down-and-back direction, so, for instance, [tEst]
>is halfway to [tæst] for many of these speakers.)
>
>And my general experience of Canadian speech is
>that there's no real distinction between "hawkey"
>and "hockey" -- that, for instance, a person
>could not tell without context whether another
>were saying "He's hawking it" or "He's hocking
>it." I do think many Canadians _think_ they're
>making a distinction between those two, but they
>also often think they're making a distinction
>between "right" and "write" when none such is
>audible.
>
>James Harbeck.
>
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I wasn't disputing your last claim, that there's no real distinction
between Canadian 'hawkey' and 'hockey'; my understanding is that they are
indeed merged.  However, it seems to me that the vowel isn't really script
a but is rather somewhat farther back and slightly rounder, but not as back
and round as open o--on a continuum somewhere between script a and open
o.  By the way, as a Minnesotan, I also have the same centralized diphthong
in 'right' and 'write', though perhaps not quite as far back as you do.

Beverly

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