Kind of an inane poll since it’s always pronounced san-tuh klawz in standard usage.
See post #15. The OP is more interested in whether the last sound is /s/ or /z/. The vowel is irrelevant.
What’s the difference between a feline foot and a complex sentence?
One has claws at the end of its paws, and one has a pause at the end of its clause.
Really? You would rhyme “paws” with “Oz”? Where are you from? I’ve never heard that before.
And I totally don’t get how some people are putting a “y” at the end of “Santa.”
Aren’t you talking about the Hogfather?
Really? Surely that’s quite common across America. Isn’t that just an instance of the caught-cot merger?
Yeah! Don’t they know there ain’t no Sanity Clause?
Cot/caught merger is common in American accents.
It’s and old timey thing, like “Sa-ur-Dee” for Saturday.
Yeah, they’re a perfect rhyme for me.
How do you pronounce each?
I would.
There was a giant creature from Oz
who had long hooked claws…
Another fun pronunciation poll would be to determine the syllable breaks:
Sant-a vs. San-ta
Print-er vs. Prin-ter
Wint-er vs. Win-ter
etc.
I suspect you’d find some nice regionalisms there.
but paws would not rhyme with “klahz”. “poz” would rhyme with “klahz” but “paws” would rhyme with “saws” instead.
and floss would not rhyme with “klahss”. “kloss” would rhyme with floss, as would the “las” in Las Vegas, but “floss” would rhyme with “boss” and “loss” instead.
Claws like a cat, meow.
Oo, this is complicated.
Well, the “true” [a] doesn’t occur in my usual speech. It only comes out when I’m imitating a New England accent (“car park”) or trying to speak French.
I do have the centralized verson [ä] but the only English word I can think of that it occurs for me as a pure vowel is “father.” It also comes in my r-colored ahs, like “start the car.” I use it a lot more when speaking Bengali or German. To me “klahss” looked like an approximation of a German word, so that’s why it got this vowel.
My back vowel isn’t always a pure [ɑ] - it’s slightly rounded for me, so I think of it as [ɒ] - as in “bother.” Sometimes it’s less rounded, like in “the blahs,” so that’s what “klahz” looked like to me.
My [ɔ] is pretty close to my [ɒ], certainly not as high and rounded as “caught” is in Received Pronunciation. “Cot” and “caught” feel different in my mouth, but I suspect a lot of people listening to me will hear them as merged in my accent. This is also probably another influence of Bengali on my southern Ohio accent, because it has [ä], [ɔ]/[ɒ], and [o] as distinct phonemes. I call it [ɔ]/[ɒ], because it’s somewhere between the two and it maps to both English vowels when a Bengali speaker speaks English.