shah and shaw

[ROOD DAVID S]

"pocket" is with "bog".  There is a widespread American phenomenon of
moving front vowels upward in progress now in many urban areas (shades of
the old Great Vowel Shift, I think), so your "pocket" to "packet" example
is quite real, especially in urban areas of the east (I don't think of
Detroit as east, but it does participate in this process).  I don't know
whether this is a merger, or whether "packet" has itself moved further up.
In my native English, central New York in the 50s, "packet" has a very
ugly lower-mid vowel between [ae] and [epsilon], and a centralizing
offglide.  I got rid of that very soon after moving out of the area where
it's normal.  You can hear that, however, before nasals in many east coast
dialects -- we just generalized it to all the [ae] vowels.

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Anthony Grant wrote:

> David:
>
> Auger apart (I pronounce it the same as 'augur'), they all use the same vowel in my idiolect.  But then I'm a Brit.  I know that some people from Detroit pronounce 'pocket' with the same low vowel as Northern English speakers have in in 'packet'.  Would pocket be in the dog or the bog set for you?
>
> Anthony
>
> >>> rood at spot.Colorado.EDU 06/12/06 5:48 pm >>>
>
>
> I find it a little surprising that this discussion is taking place among
> some very sophisticated linguists.  I thought the merger/non-merger of
> these two vowels was probably the single best-known fact about American
> dialectology.  It's the primary example of dialect variation in most
> elementary linguistics books, and the first real hurdle to transcription
> exercises in intro to linguistics classes.  In Colorado I can count on any
> intro class of about 100 students having about 2/3 people who do not
> distinguish "cot" from "caught", and 1/3 people who make the distinction.
> Of course those students come from all over.
>
> 	But let me continue with a survey of another phenomenon that I
> find much stranger.  I have two distinct sets of (generally) monosyllabic
> words spelled with -og.  I use the vowel of "cot" (low central) in frog,
> hog, cog, soggy, slog, bog, fog, agog, jog, toggle, but the low back (IPA
> open o, more or less, the one in "caught") in auger, dog, and log.  My
> family, none of whom distinguish "cot" from "caught", think my
> pronunciation of "fog" or "foggy" is extremely funny, but they don't hear
> any of the others as odd.  Of course, those of you who have merged those
> two vowels anyway won't relate to this -- but does anyone else recognize
> these as 2 sets?  Before "k" I have minimal pairs (hock/hawk), but their
> spellings suggest that there's a good reason for that.  I never thought
> about it before, but I also have two contrasting sets before -ng (Congo
> and bongo are low central, same as "cot", but Cong, as in Viet Cong, and
> bong are low back, same as "caught").  All the others I can think of have
> the low back one before this consonant.
>
> 	This isn't Siouan, so maybe we shouldn't go on like this on this
> list -- censor me if you think that's the case.
>
> 	Best,
> 	David
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>
> On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote:
>
> > > As a true-born Brit (and RP-speaker) and thus heir to the nation who gave the world English,
> >
> > Right.
> >
> > > . . . "shah" and "shaw" are different for me.Shaw is higher up on the vowel trapezoid than shah.  BUT in many (disparate) parts of England (Newcastle; Bury in Lancashire, and others) this isn't the case and the vowels merge.  I say Ahkansaw but I recognis ethat etymologhically, in Miami-Illinois (and indeed in Quapaw), the vowel is much more like the 'shah' vowel.
> >
> > >From what I hear (and maybe sometimes say -- I was an Army Brat and we moved a lot during WW-II) 'shah' should have the same vowel as 'cot' and Shaw the same as 'caught'?   I THINK I have something close to an open O in both, but something just slightly lower, like the [cursive A].
> >
> > Bob
> >
>
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