And this area does NOT include Southern Ontario. The Canadian Shift:
Now, to me in Toronto, the people on the south side of Lake Ontario in, say, Rochester, have a very noticeable accent, but that’s because I hear their speech as being more nasal than ours. I’m not sure whether that’s the same thing or not.
No, they send subjects like “The FAX machine you got me last week?” and one of them texted my damn cell phone while he was on vacation. “Staff email on the web?” :rolleyes:
I pronounce ‘cot’/‘caught’, ‘mary’/‘merry’/‘marry’, and ‘Don’/‘Dawn’ the same. (Well, I pronounce ‘cot’ the same as ‘caught’. I don’t pronounce ‘cot’ the same as ‘merry’. ;))
I confess myself mystified that there is a dialect in which ‘awesome’ and ‘blossom’ do not rhyme.
Born and raised in Northern Virginia, for what it’s worth.
See, you just don’t use the “aw” sound in most of your words. That’s why awesome rhymes with blossom (I’m assuming you say “ahs-em blahs-em”), don sounds the same as dawn, and cot sounds the same as caught. You’ve got me on Mary/merry/marry; those are identical to me, but that’s not the same sound.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Me too. “Awesome” & “blossom” also rhyme.
It won’t help someone much on a message board to say “the ‘aw’ sound,” because they’re reading it in print. The “aw sound” (in print) for one is not the same as it is for another. Even if you were speaking, it depends on your interlocutor’s own productive capacity for sounds. Surely you’ve had the experience of studying a foreign language and encountering two phonemes (meaning sounds) that sound the same to you, while a native speaker hears a big difference.
Yeah, like “pen” and “pin”. 
I’m from New York and pronounce the words in all of the examples given so far (caught/cot, mary/merry/marry, pen/pin, awesome/blossom [this is honestly the first time I’ve seen that those two words can rhyme. The other examples I am familiar with]) differently. Are there examples of pairs of words for which the reverse is true? That New Yorkers say the same but most other people say differently?
Try clicking the little speakers on the main entry line at cot and caught. The word caught should sound more drawn out, (unless your dialect does not even let you hear the difference).
I’m increasingly hearing young girls pronounce short-A sounds (“cat”) with a long-A:
To-mah-to vice to-may-to.
It sounds (to my ears) isolated, halting and not as (heh) pronounced as a full-bore, Katherine-Hepburn patrician accent. Rather, strained and affected, not unlike Madonna’s British accent.
An example off the top of my head: the “Product Recall” episode of the American version of “The Office” features the clueless Andy Bernard bumping into the high school girl he’d “dated”. When she awkwardly breaks things off saying, “I have to get to Spanish”, it’s pronounced halfway between, "Spanish and “Spah-nish”.
I more recently heard a 20ish travel clerk tell a friend of mine inquiring about his airplane trip, “You’re mah-nifested for tonight on the 8:00 flight”.
I hear a clear difference, but the pronounciation of “Cot” there is strikingly bizarre. It’s almost like the speaker is trying to say “cat” but not quite getting there. I’ve honestly never heard someone make that sound before in my life. Meanwhile, the pronounciation of “Caught” sounds a bit more familiar, but is very drawn out and almost a bit affected.
I’ve only ever heard those words pronounced in a way that lies roughly between those two pronounciations. Southern Ontario here. I can’t describe the way people here say those words except that it’s more or less like this pronounciation of “ought” with a K at the beginning:
That said, M-W’s sound files don’t always agree with each other, at least to my ears. Our of curiosity I looked up “Not.” According to the pronounciation IPA thing it should rhyme with “cot” but the vowel sounds the two speakers use sound distinctly different to me. “Not” is closer is vowel pronounciation to the way I’d say “Cot.”
Really? You’ve never heard someone pronounce it that way? I’ve lived in the Cleveland area all my life, and that is by far the most common way of pronouncing those words.
Fascinating. Maybe you just never noticed it, since I’m sure it’s quite common on TV and in movies…
I could possibly believe Cleveland. As Sunspace mentioned, to our ears, the accent of people living in rust belt cities is very nasal and sharp.
That pronunciation of “cot” sounds exactly like the way I say it, but the one for ought sounds way too clipped. I would say something more like “awt”. I can hear the difference between “pen” and “pin”, but I call them both “pins”.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I would have rhymed ought with the M-W version of caught (which is pretty close to my pronunciation). I would also tend to agree that the M-W pronunciations are probably exaggerated for effect, (I have no idea what dialect they are supposed to represent), and that my pronunciation of cot rhymes more closely with the M-W pronunciation of not, but at least you can hear what we are talking about. My pin and pen are pretty close to interchangeable. I also tend to say melk for milk, although I may have gotten that from my Hoosier mother as I have had SE Michiganders vehemently deny that we say it that way. (I grew up in metro Detroit,)
I was recently trying to figure out, on another message board, whether it’s common to pronounce “thither” with an unvoiced th, and I had people telling me that they couldn’t tell a difference between the voiced and unvoiced. I’d say, “Voiced is like that, unvoiced is like thing,” and they’d say, “That and thing both start with the same sound!” That completely baffled me.
Wherefore dost thou ask?
Well, I’ve never heard of that distinction before, but I do see the difference. I bet they really just had no idea what you were talking about with “voiced vs. unvoiced”, so they didn’t know what to look for. It’s not exactly an important distinction in the English language.
And are you sure you don’t have that backwards? I mean, I have no prior experience with this, but when I say “that”, I seal off my mouth before the initial sound comes out, but when I say “thing” air escapes while I’m making that sound. It would seem like the former would be called *unvoiced *and the latter voiced, but maybe they’re just named strangely.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: Looking that up, it seems like that has nothing to do with it. I still see the difference, though.
You’re talking about “aspiration”, Vox. In English, unvoiced consonants tend to be aspirated (in certain contexts), while voiced consonants are not. In fact, much of what we listen for when listening for the distinction nominally between voiced and unvoiced consonants is actually aspiration instead.
I can hear the difference in vibration in my vocal cords, too, though.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris