Hockey

[Paul Johnston]

Speaking of hockey, and the COT/CAUGHT merger, I distinctly remember
a radio announcer in Chicago during the Glenn Hall/Bobby Hull/Pierre
Pilote/Stan Mikita days, probably an ex-player, and therefore, at
that time almost certainly Canadian, who talked always about the
"Black Hocks" with a vowel that approximated those of my friends in
"hocks" (not "hawks"), i. e. a pretty front /a/.  What I've heard
Canadians do, on the whole, is use something like the Chicago vowel
in "hawks" in both.  Are there any regions in Canada that routinely
unround and/or front the merged vowel?

Paul Johnston
On May 18, 2007, at 9:17 PM, Alice Faber wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: Hockey
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> James Harbeck wrote:
>>> On a Seinfeld episode from 1995, Michael Richards is talking
>>> about hockey
>>> tickets and he pronounces the sport as "hawk-y." Has anyone ever
>>> noticed
>>> this pronunciation of this word or similarly constructed words? IMDB
>>> lists
>>> him as originating from Los Angeles, for what that's worth.
>>
>> This surely betrays my Canadian phonemic stuntedness (we don't have a
>> separate phoneme for the open o, meaning "caught" and "cot" are
>> phonemically identical in CanEng), but can you give more detail on
>> how Richards pronounces it and how you would pronounce it? In Canada,
>> generally (I don't want to rule out a few regional variations, but
>> for the most part CanEng is pretty homogeneous), the first three
>> phonemes of "hockey" are identical with "hawk". So, because I wasn't
>> paying attention to this detail when I lived in the US (and I try not
>> to watch TV shows where they talk about hockey), I'm not sure which
>> of the two words has which sound for you...
>
> For those of us who distinguish COT from CAUGHT, HOCKEY would
> typically
> be in the COT class, with a low central unrounded vowel (except for
> advanced Northern Cities speakers, who might have a rather fronted
> vowel). Without recalling the specific Seinfeld episode, I suspect
> that
> Richards used a backish, perhaps somewhat rounded vowel. However,
> if his
> native speech lacks a contrast, it's likely that his native vowel (in
> both HOCKEY and HAWK) is closer to the low central unrounded vowel
> (unless he's really from Boston!), and that the rounded vowel
> represents
> an imperfect attempt to produce the contrast.
>
>
>
> --
> ======================================================================
> ========
> Alice Faber
> faber at haskins.yale.edu
> Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
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