Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"

[Matthew Gordon]

That's a tough call. Should we teach our students a system of phonetic
representation used by an international community of scholars and available
in standard reference works including the OED or should we instead teach
them an idiosyncratic system developed by a parochial amateur who lacks even
an elementary understanding of the concept of the phoneme?


On 2/9/09 8:55 AM, "Tom Zurinskas" <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:


> I do take issue that this is the "awe" phoneme.  I call it, with truespel, the
> ~or phoneme with the "o" pronounces as in "or more floor".  The tongue does
> not drop back as far as "awe".
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> It would be so much easier and simply to teach truespel to the Chinese than
> IPA.
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> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
> see truespel.com
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>> Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 13:46:15 +0800
>> From: strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM
>> Subject: Re: Eggcorn? "warn"> "worn"
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>> Poster: Randy Alexander
>> Subject: Re: Eggcorn? "warn"> "worn"
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>> "The only thing to do is to _worn_ you guys [away] from this [kind] of
>>> low-end product."
>>>
>>>
>>> This one probably is dialect-dependent. In my speech, "warn" and
>>> "worn" don't fall together, though, e.g. "sense," "since," and "cents"
>>> do.
>>
>> Interesting. I believe this is the most common and standard AmE
>> pronunciation for both words, but I'd be interested in what ANAE (or
>> any other dialect survey) says if anyone has access to that (if it
>> even covers that).
>>
>> OED has [wɔːn] (lengthened opened O) for both, and [wɔən] (open O
>> followed by schwa) as an alternate pronunciation for worn, so it looks
>> like in BrE they are homonyms for most people too.
>>
>> My father's wife (white, grew up in Cincinnati) once argued with me
>> about the correct or most common pronunciation of "warn" (or war,
>> ward, wart, warm, etc.). She said "warn" is [wɑɚn] (script A and
>> right-hook schwa), rhyming with "barn", adding that newscasters say it
>> that way. I told her no way. Later, she said she paid careful
>> attention to newscasters saying those words and admitted to me that
>> she was wrong (which was the first and only time she has ever done
>> that).
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>> In my pronunciation classes I teach that "ar" preceded by "w" sounds
>> [oÉš] (lower-case O and right-hook schwa).
>>
>> --
>> Randy Alexander
>> Jilin City, China
>> My Manchu studies blog:
>> http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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