Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Actually, as Tom himself has noted, the open-o (the sound 'awe') is used before /r/ by many/most Americans in, e.g., worn, born, ore, etc. Of course, it functions as an allophone of /o/ for many of these speakers, at least I think that's the proper analysis for those of us who don't have the open-o phoneme in, e.g., caught, bought, law, etc.

As a matter of fact, those of us with the merger can (and some do, e.g., in Boston) use the open-o sound (or something close to it) in a wider range of words than speakers who preserve the phonemic distinction between the COT and CAUGHT vowels. Once the phonemic distinction is eliminated, we're free to use whichever allophone (from [a] to open-o) we want in both the CAUGHT class and the COT class.

So, that's why it's insufficient to describe the situation as "dropping the awe sound." The sound's still there; it's just distributed differently in a merged speaker's phonology. Hmm, once again the concept of the phoneme is useful to understanding the sound system of English. Who knew?

-Matt Gordon


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Tom Zurinskas
Sent: Wed 2/11/2009 8:59 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"
 
There are people that have dropped the sound "awe" ~au completely out of their foenubet (set of sounds in a language - my word).  And if the trend continues, we're gonna lose that sound altogether in USA English.  This trend must stop.

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