On 2007-06-07 21:52, Rick McCallister wrote:
> Which gives rise an unrelated question
> Linguistic books tend to categorize <or> as /Or/
> ("awr") rather than /or/, yet I have never heard
> anyone ever pronounce <or> as /Or/.
> The closest thing to such a pronunciation I've ever
> heard is New York pronunciation of <orange> as /aR@.../
> rather than standard US /oR@.../ and colloquial /ornj/
> I have heard /O/ among some, but not all, people who
> drop final /-r/, e.g. but never among those who
> pronounce it, e.g. <whore> as /hO/ in some British and
> Northeastern US dialects vs. /ho/ (not /how/) in some
> Southern US and African-American dialects
> They also distinguish <poor> from <pore> and <hoarse>
> from <horse>. I've lived in almost every region of the
> US and I last herd this distinction from very old
> people when I was a child, and their distinction was
> /pu@.../ vs. /por/, /hu@.../ vs. /hors/
> Any ideas?
Oh, this is rather complicated. Some accents of English still
distinguish reflexes of ME /O:r/ and /or/ (with non-prevocalic /r/), so
that <hoarse> and <horse> are not homophones and <fork> doesn't rhyme
with <stork>. The distinction is usually maintained in Scottish and
Ulster English, for example, and can sometimes be heard in Irish and
American English, with a higher and tenser vowel in the <hoarse> set.
Most modern accents, however, have merged both. There has also been a
partial merger of ME /o:r/ with /O:r/, preventing the former from
becoming a fully high vowel in <floor, source> etc., while <poor, moor>
etc. have vacillated between /u(&)r/ and /or/ throughout the history of
ModE. Many speakers show a general merger of ME /or/, /O:r/ and /o:r/,
not to mention /iur/ (as in <cure>) and, in non-rhotic accent, /au/ (as
in <cause>) as well. Thus in RP, for example, <source> = <sauce>, and
both rhyme with <horse> and <hoarse>.
When the /r/ is followed by a vowel, RP always has <sorry> with short
open /O/ and <story> with mid-high long /o:/ (the same as the RP vowel
of <cause>, but considerably higher than anything that any US English
accent has in this word). The vowel of <sorry, borrow, tomorrow> is
typically unrounded (with the same treatment as in <lot>) in Gen.Am.,
but only some accents, mainly in the East, have this unrounding in
<forest> or <orange>, which seem to have the same phonological
representation of the vowel as in the <horse> (plus <hoarse>) set. In
other words, some occurrences of this originally mid-low vowel have
already been assigned to the phoneme /o/. The US English vowel systems
are evolving fast: the unrounding in <stalk> (= <stock>) continues to
gain ground, which means that the old phoneme /O/ (the "aw" vowel, once
also common in <dog, song, cloth, on>) has been or is being eliminated
through a phonemic split and the merger of its products with either /a/
or /o/ (the latter only before /r/ in _some_ words).
Piotr