I don’t disagree with that. What you said is true. But what I was saying was that we West Coasters aren’t even trying to make that sound. It’s like saying, “People from the South eats grits because they don’t know how to cook potatoes”, which is false. Whether they can cook potatoes is immaterial; they eat grits because that’s simply how they do things there.
Got it. In cases like this, any difference in ability is the consequence of different behaviors, not the cause. Southerners may have weaker potato-cooking skills, but that’s because they eat grits instead.
I don’t think anyone in this thread has been implying that Californians have an innate difficulty pronouncing certain sounds. What’s been discussed is the possibility of Californian adults (e.g., college students studying linguistics) learning to pronounce sounds not in their dialect.
However, I think most of the roughly 25% of Californians who say cot and caught differently probably learned it as kids from their parents, not as adults in a classroom.
An interesting question is whether Spanish-speaking immigrants who learn English as adults in California learn to distinguish these sounds.
First of all, back to Sausalito, Vowel 1 is more representative of how I speak.
Second, I think the point made in the second paragraph in the above quote is probably valid - California has a large population of people born elsewhere, and even instate, there are regional accents. There are places in the Central Valley where born and raised Californians have STRONG Okie accents, for example.
Third, the point in the first paragraph seems obvious to me. It’s been a couple years since I’ve lived in California and I definitely have picked up a Midwestern accent. (My parents - both born in California, btw - tease me about it when I say something particularly amusing.) I do use sounds that are outside of my native dialect. But this particular sound (the caught/cot thing) is pretty subtle and at least for me, difficult to imitate and even hear.
I’d just like to reiterate that for those of us who have accents that are different from yours, these kinds of posts really tell us nothing.
No, it was the other way around. Bordelond mistakenly thought that I was implying that, which I was not.
By the way, if you look at the Harvard survey, it’s not just California, it’s ALL of the Western states that pronounce cot and caught the same. In fact, the percentage of people who pronounce them the same in other western states is even higher than in California. The Midwest tends to be about 1/2 and 1/2.
There’s no good way to communicate accents in normal spelling. You can use specialized phonetic alphabets, which most people don’t know how to interpret. You can describe mouth movements in minute detail, which works for some people. (I learned to hear and pronounce Russian palatalized consonants mainly by reading descriptions of what the tongue does.) But sound recordings are usually the best thing.
However, it can be interesting to compile lists of words that are pronounced with one vowel or the other. Spelling can often predict this—o and a versus au and aw in this case—but sometimes not. For example, in my dialect, fog does not rime with frog. That doesn’t tell you how I say them, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Yes, I was focusing on California just because the Harvard survey is broken down by state, so it makes sense to pick one.
For American accents:
“aw” = “or” without the R;
“o” = “are” without the R.
I hate to beat a dead horse but this still doesn’t work (and for me it’s inaccurate). These attempts are like telling a color-blind person that purple is blue mixed with red.
So “aw” is the long-o sound???
So “or” rhymes with “oar”???
Y’know what I think the problem is? When one combines sounds, there is a point between the two sounds where the first sound necessarily changes, but the second sound hasn’t been fully formed yet. When we say “or” we don’t say oh-ruh, but rather we make a continuous sound, like ooooaaarrrrr, the ‘aaa’ sound being what’s coming out of your mouth for the brief instant that you are reforming your oral cavity to make the ‘r’ sound. It IS the long-o sound, but it changes for a brief moment as you transition to the consonant sound. And I think linguists are considering the whole thing as a seperate vowel sound, when it really isn’t. In my dictionary, for example, the word “oat” is shown as a long-o sound, but the word “or” is not. But I find it impossible to say “or” without having some sort of intermediate sound come out between the ‘o’ and the ‘r’, whereas saying ‘oat’ merely requires the striking of the tongue on the roof of the mouth, without having to change the shape of the oral cavity. I don’t believe it’s really a seperate vowel sound; the difference is simply the ending consonant.
For me it does, but I don’t use a long o sound for either of those words.
See my earlier point about the inadequacy of ordinary spelling to convey such information.
Around here it does, although in conversation “or” tends to sound more like “er”. If I emphasize the word (“we’ll combine the values with bitwise OR”), it sounds exactly like “oar”.
This may be true for your speech, but I am quite sure that when I say oar and oat my mouth does not even START in the same position. It’s just a different sound.
As an experiment, try saying O-ring and oaring. These sound different when I say them (even quickly and sloppily) and the main difference is the quality of the initial vowel.
Don’t try to describe pronunciation in ways that make the spelling logical. It doesn’t work, because spelling is not the basis of most pronunciation habits.
Well that’s fine for you. My mouth most definitely starts in the rounded, long-o position for both words, as do the soundfiles on the Merriam-Webster website.
Actually, the sound starts exactly the same for both words. But at any rate, that’s not the same thing. In “o-ring”, the “r” is the initial sound of the word ring, and can easily be articulated as such without affecting the long-o sound.
Try this experiment. Say “o-ring”, but leave off the “ing”, and have the “r” be the terminating sound. I find it impossible to do so without changing the long-o sound in some way. Similarly, try saying “Eros” with a long-e sound. Pretty simple, right? Now try saying “ear” with a long-e sound. When the “r” is the terminating sound, it’s virtually impossible to maintain the “eeeee” sound all the way to the “r” without having it change right before the “r” sounds.
Uh, wasn’t doing that, thanks.
Firstly, (and this is just a general comment, not to anyone in particular) I don’t get how dialectal differences can get to be such a heated subject. Tomato, tomahto, and all that jazz.
But, I did want to mention that in Afrikaans -ier is done exactly like you’ve demonstrated above, and one of the hardest things for me to say. For example, the word “vier”(four). The books tell you too say the word fee- and then tack an r on the end without changing the shape of your e. It’s easier said than done, and to this day I still struggle with it.
I’m guessing that in Afrikaans, “r” stands for a trilled, flapped, or uvular sound rather than the “vowel approximant glide” in standard American accents. The way most Americans pronounce “r,” it’s closer to a vowel than a consonant, so putting it next to a vowel tends to force a diphthongal effect.
Please don’t snap at me. I was saying that you can’t apply your own speech patterns as a general rule about how “we” say words, because of dialect differences. If I implied that there was something wrong with your speech, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.
Also, and I should have said this before, I agree with your point about the effect of the r on the preceding vowel.
If you are talking about my pronunciation, you’re wrong. If you’re talking about your own, I’m sure you’re right—I certainly can’t claim to know better than you how you speak.
Unless you stop your voice between syllables, you still have to keep vocalizing while moving from one position to the other. But I’ll grant you that as a compound word, O-ring may be articulated differently, so the comparison is probably not apt.
I can minimize the change if I try, but you’re right. However, even if I make no attempt to preserve the vowel, it doesn’t come out the same as or, because my jaw is more open right at the start.
When I say Eros with a long e, making no attempt to minimize the effect of the r, the first syllable comes out exactly the same as when I say ear. So these two experiments don’t have the same result for me.
When I say or, I begin on a vowel that I do not use (as far as I know) anywhere but before r. It is similar to the way many people here in Iowa, and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest, say the long o. But I don’t say the long o that way.
But I wasn’t talking about YOU. You jumped in and interjected your own personal pronounciation into what I was saying. I do not have a special sound that I use only for the word “or”, nor, apparently, does CurtC, the person to whom I was responding. I still maintain that, IMO, some people hear the long-o sound as being a completely different vowel sound when it’s affected by the trailing consonant. If you personally happen to actually use a completely different vowel sound, that’s fine - I wasn’t talking to you. At any rate, I’m tired of arguing with you. Perhaps we should both stop responding to each other in this thread.
You came off as being argumentative, pedantic, and condescending about it. If that wasn’t your intention, then I apologize for my reaction.