postvocalic /l/

[Barbara Need]

Tom,

All we have is evidence that speakers of different dialects don't
always understand each other.

Barbara

Barbara Need


On 5 Mar 2010, at 10:26 AM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:

> If the fear is irrational, why do we have a clear example that "awe-
> dropping" leads to miscommunication?  Apparantly when the "l" was
> not heard for the word "brawl" and it was pronounced "braal", it was
> taken to be "bra".  So in a workplace where "off" and "on" are
> spoken frequently, it should be obvious that there is an increasing
> danger of miscommunication if "off" is pronounced with the "ah"
> phoneme.
>
>
> As for how "Most of N America" say "cot/caught", 61% say these words
> differently and 39% say them the same.  Dialect Survey - http://www3.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html
> Are there any other data on this.
>
> IMHO awe-dropping is a change to the traditional pronunciation of
> English words that goes against the basic principle of alphabetic
> writing and increases miscommunication, and deviates from the other
> Englishes of the world hurting standardized pronunciation.  No good
> comes from awe-dropping.  Dropping "awe-dropping" is worth having a
> "bra" over.
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Poster: "Gordon, Matthew J."
>>
>> Because it's been several months since Tom shared this particular
>> irrational fear, I'd like to offer some perspective for anyone who
>> might have missed the responses to his earlier posts on this.
>>
>> 1. In most of North America, 'on' and 'off' are pronounced with the
>> same phoneme. This includes those areas where the low back vowel
>> merger is found (i.e. where 'cot' and 'caught' come to be
>> homophones) but also the traditional South and Midland regions of
>> the US. It's only in the traditional North that 'on' is pronounced
>> with an unrounded vowel and 'off' with a rounded one, and guess
>> which region Tom represents.
>>
>> 2. Even for those dialects that use the same phoneme in 'on' and
>> 'off' there would normally be strong allophonic differences between
>> the vowels involving nasalization (with 'on') and shortening (for
>> 'off'). For non-linguists, this means that the vowels are not
>> pronounced the same and therefore a distinction could be detected
>> even if (for some reason) the final consonants in the words were
>> inaudible.
>>
>> 3. /l/ vocalization and deletion is an extremely common phenomenon
>> found to varying degrees in many (perhaps most or even all)
>> varieties of English around the world. There is no such tendency,
>> as far as I know, for similar deletion of either /n/ or /f/ at the
>> end of words except maybe in consonant clusters.
>>
>> 4. "steward", really????
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
>> Of Tom Zurinskas
>>
>> If an "awe-dropper" mispronounces the word "brawl" as ~braal (with
>> "ah" instead of "awe" as the vowel) it's easy to hear "bra" (if the
>> "l" is not said strongly).
>>
>> My big worry is that "off" when said with the "awe-dropped" becomes
>> ~aaf and sounds like "on" if the last phoneme is dropped, which, as
>> we see, can happen. In fact on an airplane I heard the steward say
>> "Turn all electronic devices ah". He clipped the last phoneme,
>> which was "f", for "off" I suppose, not "n" for "on". But the "ah"
>> might make one suppose "on". Not good in critical applications to
>> confuse "off" and "on".

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