ont/ahnt

[Paul Johnston]

Most dialects where the LOT class is a low back ROUNDED vowel will pronounce ont and ahnt differently, particularly because of the /n/ after it-- Eastern New England, the area from Erie PA through Pittsburgh down into West Virginia and into Kentucky, several Upper Southern dialects, Canada--in Eastern New England, the difference should be really striking: [D] (I mean the IPA symbol for a low back rounded vowel here) vs. a front [a:].

Paul Johnston


On Oct 6, 2010, at 10:23 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: ont/ahnt
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 10/5/2010 08:49 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 5:45 PM, David Wake <dwake at stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
>>> "ont"
>>
>> In most dialects of AmE, "ont" = "ahnt."
>
> Can you give me some examples where it doesn't?  And please don't say
> you won't.
>
> Joel
>
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