ADS-L Digest - 10 Feb 2009 to 11 Feb 2009 (#2009-43)

[David Bowie]

From:    Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Subject: Naming conventions for vowel mergers (Was    Re: Eggcorn? "warn" >
>          "worn")

> This is a good point. If I didn't already know (or bother to read up on it),
> I wouldn't know which vowel the cot/caught merger resulted in. Or, if the
> term "low back merger" was used, which earlier-stage vowel ended up as a low
> back vowel. Indeed, I didn't remember whether the card/cord merger resulted
> in "card" or "cord" prevailing. The suggestion of the "(word 1)-to-(word 2)"
> naming convention sounds good to me.

Actually, the first paper i published on this, i *switched* from calling
the northern Utah phenomenon the cord-card merger (which i had been
using in presentations up to that point) to calling it the card-cord
merger, based on analogy with the cot-caught merger, where in *most*
speech communities with the merger it's vowel2-into-vowel1.

Under this, we'd have to say that people from areas with the merger
opposite that of the northern Utahn system (and, if i recall correctly,
the one Wilson grew up with) exhibit the the cord-card merger, not the
card-cord merger. I think there may be something to this--my intuition,
slippery and unreliable beast that it is, says that those may well be
completely different processes.

Of course, this can't really be applied consistently--the pin-pen
merger, for example, often results in some intermediate form, neither
[I] nor [E]. Similarly, cot-caught is such an ingrained term that it
simply means those historical vowels becoming the same, no matter the
direction.

As an aside, "cot-caught merger" results in 4,640 raw googits, while
"caught-cot merger" gives 61 (with both as phrases). ("Cot-cot merger"
results in zero, while "caught-caught merger" gives 1, a fairly obvious
typo.) "Card-cord merger" gives 45, "cord-card merger" gives 13. I teach
in just a bit, or i'd check and see if there's any general trend in
which direction of merger each name tends to refer to.

<snip>

--
David Bowie                               University of Central Florida
     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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