ont/ahnt

[Paul Johnston]

They do say "on't" in Northern West Virginia (and "in't" too)--there it's more like "awnt" (not "aunt").

Paul Johnston
On Oct 6, 2010, at 4:16 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: ont/ahnt
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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