Ditto – my “cold” and “called” sound much like Shrinking Violet’s. I’m sure there is a slight difference, but it would be subtle.
caught = cot
are phonetically different sounds, but most Asians cannot distinguish them.
Apology accepted. Thank you.
No, that wasn’t my point. My point was, in our dialect (75% of us, anyway), the “au” sound doesn’t exist. I’m sure we could learn to say it, but there is no point in doing so. That makes about as much sense as leaning how to say “y’all” because that’s what they do in Texas. There’s no right or wrong here, just different dialects. The pronounciation guides in dictionaries are merely reflective of the way people pronounce words, and can’t possibly reflect all regional differences. They are not prescriptive. I would think that a linguist would make it his business to learn all regional variations, but it’s a little presumptuous to suggest that the East Coast is right and the West Coast ought* to learn how to talk like they do.
*Or should that be “ot”? 
I’m sure many “cot=caught” folks don’t often come across a reason to learn to recognize the distinction, but some do. The phonetic students I have in mind learn it (any many other fine distinctions) so that they may accurately transcribe speech wherever in the world their fieldwork may take them.
Also, students of languages such as Italian, Russian, and Swedish will learn to distinguish these vowels during the course of their studies.
Lastly, there is the case of simply making oneself understood in isolated instances such as the “Don/Dawn” story on the previous page of this thread. Admittedly, this is highly unlikely to become a stumbling block to conversation with another English speaker.
“pen” and “pin” are pronounced alike in County Kerry, and I believe New Zealand also.
Can I make a what may be a preposturous conjecture here? Maybe, just maybe, a good number of us have no idea how we really say words. Maybe, like me, you only imagine them differently.
I say this because in teaching my wife English, correct pronunciation is one of the keys. And I catch myself time after time saying the word the “correct” way when reciting it, but then saying it a completely different way when speaking at 100 words per minute. That is, I tend to take verbal shortcuts. Of course this frustrates my wife to no end.
For example: toward. Reciting the word, it’s two syllables. Tuh-ward. Saying it normally in a sentance, it’s more like “tord.”
Funny, this thread had reminded me of this exact word. When I recite the prepositions (don’t ask) I say “To-ward” when I get to that word. In conversation, I say it similar to you (“tward”). Comfortable is another good example. I say com-fer-tuh-bull when reciting the word, but “Comf-ter-bull” when actually saying it.
Yeah, um - didn’t I just say that, i.e. “I would think that a linguist would make it his business to learn all regional variations”???
I have yet to have any difficulty with it. Believe it or not, when people tell me they caught a fish, I almost never think they’re talking about a bed. :rolleyes:
Well, I guess there’s always one prescriptionist snob in every thread…
We’re speaking past each other a little bit here. Being familiar with the dialects of a given language is a different matter than being familiar with the inventory of human speech sounds.
I’m being pedantic, and none of this discussion really matters. However, I am a little frustrated with myself that I am having a hard time communicating nuance and intent in this thread.
I had meant to concede exactly this point fully in my previous post. If it seemed like I was holding back, I’m sorry.
Absolutely not – I consider all dialects of English to be equally valid. In no way do I consider your pronunciation of these words to be incorrect. I never laid that out clearly before in this thread.
Here’s what I’m still mulling, though – amarinth is also of the “cot=caught” dialect, and yet he/she said he/she could readily distinguish the vowels in question. You said you cannot (I think?). What I am thinking is “why can amarinth (representing a subset of West Coast speakers) but not blowero (representing another subset of WC speakers)?”
I am interested in that question academically – I like to think I am able to ponder that without making a value judgment of any kind. Apparently, I am nevertheless inadvertantly communicating a value judgment to you.
That’s not preposterous at all; it’s generally true. I think it explains why so many people are unaware of subtle dialect differences like the ones we’ve been discussing, even though they encounter them all the time—normal speech is sloppy enough to cover the differences up.
It is similar with people who study music, they can distinguish between pitches perfectly, but cannot reproduce it themselves.
Cot/Caught both sound like “Bought” (and ought and shot and…) not “Bob” Even after listening to the sample I can’t imagine how one would say Cot with the sound from Bob without it sounding more like Cat than cot.
Around here Caught and Cot, and Taught and Tot are the same as are Don and Dawn. Once upon a time one of my hall directors met with the upperclassmen on move-in day. She told us that she and her SO were glad to be in NH, and her SO was thrilled that she would be seeing snow for the first time. You could see the surprised comprehension on all our faces D-a-w-n, not D-o-n like we’d thought. Apparently wherever see she was from (south west, I believe) either said said Dawn the way we say both, or they say them the same too. Arron and Erin, on the other hand, are just enough different that when my friend Erin, who dated Arron, was spoken about in the same sentence as her boyfriend we usually didn’t confuse if the speaker meant him or her.
Draw and Drawer are pretty close too, but I know that’s regional. Marry, Merry, and Mary are all different. Concord and Conquered (con-kurd) almost the same, but Concorde (con cord) is different, so it makes that joke about naming the kid for Concord NH in the Concorde car commerical fall very flat.
As a Boston native, I pronounce “cot” and “caught” identically. But I diferentiate between “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry”.
The vowel in “coat” is a diphthong?! So it’s like “cow-t”? For me, it’s a simple long o (said “oh”), like in “road”.
salutes Reporting for duty! I would say “tarp” as “tahp” – same vowel as in “father”. (Er, as in “fathah”. So, yes, “farther” and “father” are distinguishable only by context.) I would not use “tawp” to have the same vowel sound as “cop”.
Oh, I see; you are misunderstanding me. I may have said that at first, but after some people here kindly posted links to sound files, I can indeed hear a difference. I really explained it all quite clearly, I thought; I even posted a very detailed analogy to colors using the smilie colors. I don’t really want to waste everyone’s time repeating it all. If you go back to that post, I think you’ll get what I’m saying.
Well actually, maybe I can explain it in a nutshell. I think we’d all agree that a 6-year-old girl saying the word “ball” sounds different than a 40-year-old man saying the world “ball”, yet we still recognize both sounds as being THE SAME WORD. That doesn’t mean we can’t hear the difference between the two. Does that help clear things up?
It’s not really that people cannot, it’s that they don’t. People from Texas most certainly could say “all of you”, but they say “y’all”. People on the West Coast probably could make a different sound for “ou”, but they don’t. It’s not a matter of ability at all. This is becoming very frustrating that people aren’t understanding such a basic idea.
No, not “cow-t” – the vowel in “road”, the “simple long o”, said “oh” is a diphthong in English. It’s not as obvious as the diphthongs in English “bout” and “bite” because in those words, the tongue’s highest point moves along two axes – from down to up and from middle to back/front (respectively).
In the diphthong in “coat”, the tongue barely moves in the front-to-back axis, and it only jogs a slight bit up on the up-down axis.
FWIW, the “simple long a” in “bait” is also a diphthong.
Point taken.
I understand, but I don’t agree. While people are certainly capable of making sounds that don’t appear in their language or dialect, it usually takes practice and often they never get it quite right. That’s why foreigners have foreign accents.
Children below about twelve years old find it easy to imitate foreign sounds. After that, changes in the brain make it difficult for most people.
Um, I always thought the joke in there was that the daughter was conceived in the Concorde – which may be why they pulled it from the air so quickly. No offense to you and yours, but I doubt most people in the US (thanks to our stellar educational system) have even heard of Concord NH outside of the context of the Revolutionary War.