This kind of thing is common in all human languages. In English, the “p” sounds in “pot” and “spot” are different – in “top”, the “p” is produced with a mild puff of breath (called an aspirated consonant). The “p” in “spot” is unaspirated.
This distinction between the “p” sounds makes no real difference in English, except sometimes to mark a foreign accent. However, these two “p” sounds are considered completely different consonants in Thai, and a word can have totally different meanings depending upon which “p” is used (tone not marked, aspiration marked by [sup]h[/sup] ):
I use Vowel 1 for “sauce” … but Vowel 2 for “Sausalito”. But I’ve not had much ocassion to say “Sausalito” – though I could swear I’ve heard it many times with Vowel 2.
No, I’m saying I can’t imagine pronouncing it the other way - like “Stockton.” Should we tackle Sebastopol next?
Apparently not.
OK, let’s try tis. Click the speaker icon here to hear the M-W.com guy pronounce “cot” just like I do, and click the speaker icon here to hear him pronouce “caught” just like I do.
Again, I’m an Easterner, and I distinguish cot and caught. But I say aunt with the same vowel as cot—not the vowel in awe. I’m from Maryland, though, not New England.
Just because someone is from California doesn’t mean that they can’t be taught to recognize the distinction between the two vowels from those links I posted.
California is home to two of the most important linguistics faculties in the world – Cal-Berkely and UCLA. Surely there are native Californian students in those programs who passed Phonetics class?
I think they sometimes pronounce it with the “aw” (vowel 1 in bordelond’s post), which they also tend to use for the word “on”. To me, that sounds funny. I pronounce the words “on” and “aunt” with the open-up-and-say-ah vowel sound.
Nifty. I didn’t know they had sound files. Would’ve saved some trouble. That’s fascinating; I had no idea that some people considered that as a seperate vowel sound. To me, it just sounds like a slightly more subtle version of the way New Yorkers say “ah” AND “aw”, as in, “What up, dawg?”, or “Oh my Gawd!” or one of those secretaries in a 50’s movie: “Mr. Jawnson, you have a phone cawll.”
Ah. I get it now. You pronounce Rotterdam, Ottawa and Nottingham like the first three, not the other way around, which is what I had originally thought.
I say Suh-BAS-tuh-pole.
(I love these types of threads. I had an earlier one where I asked where people were from if they pronounced “room” as “rum”)
Here’s another regionalism for y’all to toss around. My dialect does not ever have a short-e sound right before the letter “n”. So to me, “pin” and “pen” sound exactly alike. I stumbled upon the fact that some pronounce them differently, when I was out of college and got a real job. I asked a secretary if I could borrow a pen for a moment. She asked “a pen or a pin?” I said “a pen.” She then got her purse and started digging through it, while there were multiple pens sitting right there on top of her desk. I was very confused about what the hell she was doing for several moments until she explained it to me.
I have read that your way of pronouncing these words is limited to the southern U.S. Unfortunately I can’t remember where I read that. It certainly sounds like a Southern pronunciation.
But my point was that, unlike middle-class whites, they don’t tend to use the ‘a’ sound as in man, ant, fan, etc. when saying the word “aunt”. The way I say it, as a middle-class white guy, aunt and ant are pronounced identically. And if I’m not mistaken, many black people (I’m thinking of the East Coast rappers you hear on t.v. especially) use the “aw” sound for ALL those ‘o’ sounds, so “Mom, the dog is on the lawn” would sound like “Mouwm, the dauwg is ouwn the lauwn.”
Blowero, I apologize – I hadn’t meant to come off as condescending.
I thought you were saying something like “No Californian could ever hope to learn to distinguish those two vowels.” The point I was trying to get across was that, to my own personal experience, many Californians have in fact learned to do so, even when the distinction was not made in their native dialect.
)
Exactly the same as you, for my part.