At 1:18:25 AM on Thursday, February 21, 2008, Patrick Ryan
wrote:
> But someone who uses /a/ instead of /aw/ for <Sean> will
> be misleading a lot of people.
???
To me /aw/ is the diphthong in <how>, for instance, an
alternative representation to /aU/. Do you mean the vowel
of <dawn> or the like? Note that for a great many Americans
<Don> and <Dawn> are exact homonyms. (For me they're
[A]~[A.] and [O:], shifted many years ago from an original
frontish-central [a] and [A.]~[A], respectively.)
Brian