Re: [tied] Re: On the ordering of some PIE rules

Definitely, US poor, pore, hoarse, horse, moor, more
are almost universally pronounced with /o/ as in the
Canadian pronunciation of sorry and borrow but not
with /O/ as in the US pronuncation of sorry and
borrow.
/aw/ tends to be stigmatized as "redneck" in
pronunciations such as /dOg/, /gOd/, etc. and is
generally seen as a Southern and lower class
pronunciation. I have only heard cloth as /kla:T/,
never /klOT/ in US English. I see <stocker> as a
mispelling for <stalker> all the time.


--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>

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