That’s a good site. I do hear differences in father, car, caught, etc., in some regions, but to my ear they are incredibly subtle differences. I’d still like to actually hear “cot” and “law” pronounced by one of the people in this thread who says they are different. Maybe we could devise a list of words and have each of us say the words and post a sound file.
I do frequently hear people do what, to my ear, sounds like they are mixing a “u” sound in with the “a” sound, so “law” sounds like “luuu-awh”, or even “luu-awr”, but never native Californians. I always took that to be like a Brooklyn accent, as in “Check out dis bruuuawd!” (Check out this broad!)
Caught=cot
Mary=merry; marry is different
Tomahto, short, very likely derived from the Spanish
My father, whose father ran gold mines in California, was brought up in Boston to age six. Upon arrival in California, the locals pounded the Boston out of him. He claims he would say, “It makes me lawff to see the cawff, walk down the pahth, to take a bahth.”
Auburn=Sausalito=Austin=Rotterdam=Ottawa=Nottingham=law=cot to me: me too.
I pronounce ladder and latter differently, but a lot of people pronounce them alike (w/reference to the middle consonant).
I find this endlessly fascinating. To me, it is impossible to understand how someone can not hear the difference between “o” and “aw.” Anyhoo, for reference, I’ve recorded myself. I’m from New York, baby. Make of it what you will.
It’s not so hard to understand … the vowels are close phonetically. It is very much akin to how nartive Spanish speakers (when learning English as adults) have trouble distinguishing the vowels in “beat” and “bit”.
For speakers where “cot”=“caught”: do friedo’s first four samples all sound like they contain the same vowel?
FWIW, I pronounce these words exactly as friedo does.
I’ve never heard a version of “lawyer” that varied too much from your pronunciation, either – “loy-yer” sounds about right.
But as for “law” – you say it “lah”? Compare it to the “la” in Deck the halls with boughs of holly / Fa la la la la / La la la la. All those la’s in the song sound like the word “law”?
Let’s compare vowels to a different language, Spanish. The first “a” in casa … that’s the same vowel in the English word “law” to you?
It’s not that they sound the same, it’s that we (or at least I) don’t use one of those vowels at all. It doesn’t appear in my dialect. I have a hard time even making that sound.
Yes.
(In fact, I was thinking the same thing before you typed it.) That’s how I would say “law.” I’ve heard people from different dialects say it differently, but they “talk funny”
How do you say “aw, man!”? It comes out “ah, man!” ?
“Awful” and “awesome” are “ah-ful” and “ah-some”?
Keep in mind, when I write “ah”, I mean the same vowel as the last vowel in Jimmy Fallon’s “No-maaah!”. Same as the “ah” in Bostonian “Hah-vahd”, “pahk the cahr”, etc. We’re talking about the same vowel, right?
You say “law” to rhyme with Bostonian “cah” (car)?
I have the nagging feeling that this is more a perception difference than a marked pronunciation difference. I have known people from all over the U.S., had many concersations with said people, and I have never heard:
“Hey, I **sah ** that guy here yesterday.”
“You’re not the bahss of me!”
“I gotta mow the lahn today.”
“Brahnny paper towels are better than the store brand.”
…
Just did a quick inventory of two coworkers – one from Chicago, and the other from rural Mississippi. Both distinguish “cot” and “caught” in exactly the way friedo does. My colleague from Chicago distinguishes them even more strongly than friedo and I do.
It can’t be purely perceptual, but that’s part of it. Hearing phonemes is a matter of noticing certain variations and ignoring others. Pronouncing phonemes is a matter of controlling certain variations and ignoring others. People who say cot and caught the same way may actually say both words both ways without realizing it.
Actually, I pronounce Austin like Ottowa or cot but Auburn and Sausalito sound different. The aw in Auburn and law is slightly longer and a little rounder while in Austin and cot it is shorter and flatter.
That could be because I’ve lived and Austin and thats how people who live there say it, while I pronounce Auburn like how my accent would normally pronounce it.
Not so. I’m from SC, and “caught” != “cot” here. The vowel sound in “cot” is pronounce pretty much as the one in “pa,” whereas the one in “caught” gets the vowel sound in “paw.”
RR
What some folks here seem to be saying is that they’d pronounce that sentence something like: “I bot a robot” … or “I baht a row-baht” if that makes it clearer.
