ont/ahnt

[Joel S. Berson]

A preliminary question:  what in this message rated three chilies from Eudora?

At 10/6/2010 03:52 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > Can you give me some examples where it doesn't?  And please don't say
> > you won't.
> >
>
>Right clever, Joel! ;-) OTOH, AmE are wont not to pronounce to
>pronounce "wont" so that it falls together with "won't," problematic
>for those BE/SE speakers for whom there is no phonetic distinction
>among _want wont won't_.

So are want and wont a minimal pair?  I could deceive myself into
distinguishing these (I do distinguish "won't"), but it's harder for
"farder/bother".

>BTW, what was the pronunciation of
>now-obsolete _on't_ for "on it"?

Can we ever know?  But my guess is "ahnt".

Joel

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