coffin pronunciation

[Tom Zurinskas]

Surprise to me too, but I've heard "cloddy" for "cloudy" from a weather forecaster.  It could be his own dialect,- ideolect, but ~fer sher~ it was there.  I didn't mean to imply there was the sound "awe" in either words, just that point that pronunciation gets slushy even for newscasters.  Many newscaster drop "awe" for "ah" in south FL.

My theory is that some phonemes are easier to say than others.  "Ah" is easier to say than "ou", a diphthong.  Also "ah" is easier to say than "awe", thus awe-dropping is going on swapped for "ah".  In fact, a friend from CT whose son is "Shawn" now calls him ~Shaan (~aa as in Saab), and swapped "awe" for "ah" for her own son's name.

The phoneme ~aa is easy to say.  It's the most common vowel (truespel book 1) in a study that does not count schwas as a vowel but sorts out all schwas into the various phonemes that schwas represent.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
See truespel.com - and the 4 truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at authorhouse.com.


> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: James Smith
> Subject: Re: coffin pronunciation
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Tom,
>
> I followed you up to this point.
>
>> But many newscaster in FL are replacing "awe" with
>> "ah". In fact some say "cloddy" instead of
>> "cloudy".
>
> I can't hear "awe" or "ah" in "cloudy", and no "ah"
> in "cloddy"
>
>
> James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything
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> |or slowly and cautiously.
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>
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