o/u

[Frances Karttunen]

I don't think they are dialectal differences.

Nor do I think the orthographic variation reflects pronunciation or
phonological "change."

The correspondence of long /o:/  to orthographic u doesn't hold up.  A
number of people have compiled extensive lists of attested u for /o:,
o/ and found no predictable pattern.  It doesn't correlate with length
or with stress.

So far as I can tell, the situation is simply that Spanish has two
rounded back vowels, /o/ and /u/, that contrast in point of
articulation, whereas Nahuatl has two rounded back vowels that contrast
in length.  For Nahuatl, point of articulation for a back rounded vowel
isn't salient, so it can be all over the map, so to speak. Ears attuned
to Spanish sometimes hear u and other times o, but it's all the same to
native speakers of Nahuatl.  Hence the randomness of the orthography.

We need to  beware of identifying a language point-by-point with the
symbols used for representing it.

A grad student from Finland once told me that after just a semester in
Bloomington, Indiana, he had made such progress with English that he
could not only hear but also produce the distinction between "right"
and "write"!!!!


On Sep 16, 2004, at 6:18 PM, Michael Mccafferty wrote:

> I bleeve these are dialectal variants, no?
>
>
>
> On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Geoff Davis wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:46:35 -0500, idiez at mac.com <idiez at mac.com>
>> wrote:
>>> Is there an explanation about when the "o" is pronounced with a "u"
>>> sound? Mario just mentioned that it is for long "o"s, but I know from
>>> experience that this is not so.
>>
>> I was pondering over this not more than a day before you posted the
>> question.
>>
>> Two examples I can think of, right off the top of my head, are:
>> cal-po:l(-li) => cal-pu:l(-li), and
>> teo:(-tl) => teu:(-tl).
>>
>> In both of these cases the long o becomes u, although I'm not
>> sure as to whether the length is preserved.
>>
>> This is, of course, not to say that long o always becomes u.  I had
>> once read that stress played some part in the change.  But, since
>> the stress differs in the two examples above and the vowel change
>> still occurs, I'm not convinced that theory holds water.
>>
>> Does anyone else have any ideas?
>>
>> -Geoff
>>
>> P.S. I have read that this resulting u is a lax high or mid-high back
>> vowel, much like the "oo" in English "book."  Can anyone confirm or
>> deny this with certainty?
>>
>>
>>
>