Provenance of /Or/ > [ar] / __@ ?

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

I've never heard of a shorthand label for this. Actually it's not studied much in the variationist literature.

The similar phenomenon that Wilson mentioned is known as the 'cord/card merger' but that differs from the situation Neil was asking about. It operates on all historical short open-o words before /r/, not just those in which the /r/ is intervocalic. So, you get something like [a] in 'forest' and 'Florida' but also in 'forty' and 'fork' etc. Labov's Atlas of North American English suggests that the vowels are merged at open-o in St. Louis, but Wilson's description fits with what I tend to hear: an unrounded [a]-like vowel. Incidentally, the 'cord/card merger' doesn't operate on historical long open-o words. So, traditional St. Louis speech distinguishes 'for' & 'four', 'or' & 'ore', etc. The pattern that most Americans have, where such pairs are homophones, is called the "NORTH/FORCE merger" based on the lexical sets of Wells (1982).

Matt Gordon


________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Ben Zimmer [bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU]
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2012 8:38 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Provenance of /Or/ > [ar] / __@ ?

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 1:36 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> On Nov 16, 2012, at 6:24 PM, Neal Whitman wrote:
>
>> I'm sure this has been analyzed somewhere at some point, but I don't know where.
>> What is the dialect that has /O/ lowering to [a] in a stressed vowel preceding
>> /r/ and an unstressed vowel? In other words, the dialect that pronounces
>> "forest" as "farrest," "Florida" as "Flarrida", "Oregon" as "Ahregun,"
>> "horrible" etc. as "harrible" etc., "authority" as "autharity", but still has
>> [O] in "fort", "lore," etc.? What is this realization called?
>>
>
> It's what I grew up with in NYC, although I've shifted over to [O] most of the time for
> these; I suspect I go back and forth (on "Florida", "orange", "forest") even though I
> think of myself as an open-o employer for these (the first group, that is; I've never
> varied on [O] for "fort" or "lore").  I think of "AH-rinj" as the locus classicus, but as I
> recall it was getting mocked for my [a] in "corridor" as a freshman in Rochester that
> led to my abandoning my native vowels in this frame.  I'm sure I never say "flarrist",
> but I probably did before the fall of 1961.

Along with NYC, the use of unrounded [A] for the "tomorrow"/"orange"
class typifies Philadelphia and the Carolinas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_r#Historic_.22short_o.22_before_intervocalic_r

I don't think this has a shorthand label in the phonological
literature, though I'm sure Mr. Gordon or one of the other
variationists on the list can correct me if I'm wrong.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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