Do American accents distinguish "aw" and short "o" sounds?

[blowero]

@TellMeI'mNotCrazy

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.

Well that was supposed to be my point - that there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ here, but some people seem to have a real “I’m right and you’re wrong” attitude about it, and I guess that kind of irks me.

[W.Fikere_Tomba]

@blowero

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.

I’m sorry. I misinterpreted you. In your response to CurtC, you said “we,” and I thought you meant it in the universal sense. I did not realize until just now that you were only talking about yourself and CurtC. I thought you were making a general statement about all English speakers, based only on your own experience.

@blowero

You came off as being argumentative, pedantic, and condescending about it. If that wasn’t your intention, then I apologize for my reaction.

No, I think your reaction was appropriate. I was being argumentative, pedantic, and condescending, because I thought you were being stupid. I did you an injustice by thinking so, and I’m sorry.

I don’t think we should stop responding to each other, because I am still interested in what you have to say. But I promise to read it more carefully!

[elfkin477]

@Bambi Hassenpfeffer

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.

Maybe there’s a joke about the jet as well, but what I was talking about is in a car commerical for the Chrysler Concorde (which is obviously named after the jet). And you’re thinking of Concord MA, not NH, in regards to the Revolutionary war.

[Aeschines]

I realized from this discussion that I do, in fact, pronouce them differently, although I had not been able clearly to recognize the difference.

Thanks!