ont/ahnt

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:16 PM -0400 10/6/10, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>A preliminary question:  what in this message rated three chilies from Eudora?

"falls together"?
"farder"?
(my own Eudora is pretty laid back about these things)

>
>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
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org