Which words were you thinking of?
Native speaker of California English. I can’t make the pure “o” sound unless I really sit and concentrate, which is what reveals my Americanness in all the other languages I speak. It’s so ingrained that “long o” makes the sound as in go, boat, etc., that words like Spanish no or French eau come out as a diphthong. Since this is common, I suspect a lot of resources geared toward English speakers just treat /oʊ/ and /o/ as if they were interchangeable, which they are in our language.
“Boker Tov!”
Yes, but the auditory examples are in conflict to the examples that were used to teach me when I learned IPA.
oʊ is by definition a diphthong. If it were not, it would be represented by a single symbol, not two. The way one identifies a diphthong is by attempting to make the sound continuously, and realizing you cannot — for example the sound we were taught in elementary school as the “long I” as in right, white, eye, is a diphthong and you can’t make it as a continuous sound. You’re either on the a sound or the I sound, if you try to say (or sing) it.
I make the vowel sound in boat, owe, total, oh, etc as a continous-capable sound that does not vary. It is not a diphthong. It also does not sound like the auditory example on the page which is more akin to the vowel sound in bought, caught, moment (the ɔ sound), as I was taught it.
That’s fair, Americans do say Boaker Tove
… it may well be that the folks who taught me IPA were ‘Americanizing’ the sounds, whether knowingly or not.
Most of those (except for 3, 6 and 12 with the heavy accents) just sound like they are saying the letter “o”. I don’t see what the difference is supposed to be between oʊ and O.
Ok looking more on that site, I can’t even find a list for the vowel “o”.
Here’s a decent primer of diphthong /oʊ/ and monophonic /o/ in English (and yes, it does occasionally appear in English). Note the example with “Oh no, I gotta go home” said with all diphthong o’s vs monophonic o’s at about 1:25:
Oooh, more than that, no non-diphthong representations exist for what school called long i either.
aɪ buy, aisle, isle
How would oooh be represented?
For the short vowels, yes. But they have long vowel sounds, and have a writing system that accommodates long vowel sounds in their own language, not just o, but the e sound (written in roman letters as i), the eh sound (written in roman letters as e) and maybe a (pronounced ah) although I can’t think of an example right now.
Back to the OP: Dialects and regiolects in Germany
The triangle marked “Northern Bavarian” and probably all transitional zones around it have it.
In Nuremberg (in the horizontally striped area to the west), Kohle sounds exactly like English “coal”.
u
booze = buz
coop = kup
I believe this is not correct. While that word indeed has a long vowel and a pitch accent in Japanese, that does not make the pronunciation oʊ. Furthermore, “doumo” is a systematic transliteration of the spelling どうも; there is no diphthong there. (“o” + “u” just means the “o” is long)
That does not correspond to any Israeli (= Sephardic), Mishnaic, or Classical pronunciation. It may well be a subtype of “Ashkenazi Hebrew”.
Oh, I agree - but if I were doing an impression of an American tourist speaking Hebrew, that’s how I’d say it.
I wasn’t thinking of American Jews as in Chabadniks, they have yet another novel set of pronunciations!
Afrikaans uses the /œʊ̯/ vowel, but I find it indistinguishable from English /oʊ/ myself. For instance, the Afrikaans koud (cold) and woud (forest) are pronounced like English coat and vote.
Interesting. Because I would say that /œʊ̯/ would be about halfway between the General American /oʊ/ and the RP /əʊ/, both of which are heard as the GOAT vowel.
Do you know of any clips where people say those Afrikaans words? I’m curious if my ears, being more used to General American, would also not hear a difference.
I didn’t say it was a diphthong, I said it was a long o that effectively becomes (i.e. sounds like) a diphthong. This was in support of my assertion that there are long o sounds in Japanese (outside of borrowed words, which have all kinds of weirdness). I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing about that.
@AHunter3 : are you from the Upper Midwest? Because I would associate using [o] instead of [oʊ] with that accent. In particular, I associate it with the phrase “Doncha know?”
Wikipedia mentions the monophthongization here:
Japanese actually has a short ‘o’ and 2 other diphthong forms of ‘o’. Tokyo and Domo Arigato fit what the OP is asking, Sumo does not.