My clip above actually has an example you can hear with a monophthong o which the presenter likens to how people in Minnesota might speak.
OK now that yes, there is a definite difference. If that’s what is meant by /o/, then yes I always use /oʊ/. That just seems so confusing because just saying the letter “O” as in LMNOP, it would be identical to /oʊ/.
The English name of the Italian city “Genoa,” which always strikes me as incredibly awkward even in English when Italian has given us “Genova” which is smoother in both languages.
These are all the same sound, transliterated as “ou”.
東京 toukyou
どうもありがとう doumo arigatou
相撲 sumou.
There is another way of writing the long “o” sound in Japanese, transliterated as “oo” (for example in the word 遠い tooi) but it sounds exactly the same to me.
お母さん okaasan = mom
Is that a typo for cola?
My parents are southern and I spend childhood half of it in Georgia and half in New Mexico. Although I spent my first two years up north in Massachusetts and my folks always said I had a bit of a northern accent mixed in.
I meant just the word stem Kohl- [koʊl] without suffixes.
Of course. Brain freeze (I tell myself).
Wiktionary has a clip of koud (though pronounced more abruptly and harsher than I would) but doesn’t include Afrikaans woud, only Dutch. Which is not pronounced the same, it’s got more “-au-” in it than the Afrikaans does.
Apologies for posting somewhat speculatively in FQ, but I think it is highly likely that Indonesian speakers, depending on their regional accent, use the “oʊ” sound.
Example: there is a verb, “mau,” that means either “want” or “about to do” something. It’s pronounced differently, with no changes in meaning, depending on where in Indonesia you live. As a native English speaker learning Indonesian, I was taught that pronouncing it “mow” (like “mow the lawn” in English) or “mao” (rhymes with “cow”) was totally fine.
So I think it’s likely that the oʊ sound is common in some areas.
It’s just a diphthong. OU. Koulu, soutaa, poutaa, all Finnish words. Finnish has nearly all the diphthongs in use, except that there is vowel harmony: YÖ but UO, other than that, UI, YI, OI, EI, ÄI and ÖI all exist. With U much the same.
Those aren’t using quite the same diphthong as //oʊ//, though. Finnish //o̞u̯// is close, but not the same (to my ears). There’s a tiny bit more of a drawl to it.
Vowels have a lot more variation among English speakers. Though spoken Finnish varies, it is a small area.
I’m fascinated just by the word burrito in English. I don’t know what the vowel is when I say it. It is not u of burro in Spanish.
It’s the STRUT vowel ʌ or the schwa ə, the same as the u in “butter”
One area that has some really interesting pure vowel realisations of the GOAT vowel is the north of England. Some areas of Yorkshire have a back vowel ɔː so that “boat” sounds like “bought”. But some areas have a very unusual rounded front vowel - “coach” sounds like “kerch”.
bɚ ri to
Americans in particular are fond of the ɚ sound. It’s essentially an R vowel. Err…
The “long o” sound does not effectively become (i.e. sound like) a dipthong in Japanese. Full stop.
I think a lot of people are confusing “long” and “short” vowels in Japanese,
with English long and short vowels (no scare quotes).
The only difference between Japanese “long” and “short” vowels vowels is the length of the sound, not a difference in pronunication.
If you listen to the “Tō” and “to” sounds in 東京都 Tōkyōto ( Tokyo Metropolis), there is no difference at all, except the first “o” in “Tō” is twice the length of the last “o” in “to”.
It’s the same with other vowels such as
おじいさん ojiisan, grandfather and おじさん ojisan, uncle,
お母さん okaasan, mother, 岡さん okasan (Mr. or Ms. Oka)
This is something the most English speakers are not used to.
As @hibernicus notes above, Japanese usually write the second “o” sound with a う “u” and sometimes with an お “o” but this doesn’t change the Japanese pronunication.
Unless you live in certain parts of Scotland, Ireland, northern England, or the Caribbean, you are almost certainly incorrect. Like nearly all English speakers, you didn’t realize you had been pronouncing this phoneme as a diphthong your whole life, until you had to learn a language (like Spanish, and many, many, others) that have the mid-vowel, “pure” o sound, and they had to keep telling you to stop moving your lips into a pout, until finally, one day, you stopped doing this.
ETA: Also Minnesota, the Dakotas, and part of Wisconsin, doncha know.
ETA again: BigT already noted this, even with the same tag phrase!
Exactly. Hungarian has a similar thing with o and ó. The second is a long o, or /o:/ and is often heard by English speakers as an English “long o”, but it is a monophthong. German, too, has an /o:/ as in the word kohl, which is pronounced with a pure /o:/, and not quite like the name “Cole.”
That’s certainly possible, as I grew up thinking the English “long i sound” was a pure vowel, and it’s not.
But you can’t sing or otherwise prolong it precisely because it is a diphthong and not a single sound – you either end up singing (or saying ) the first part – “aaaaa” – or the end part — “eeeee” (and your choir direction usually prefers you stay on “aaaa” until just before the cutoff).
Now, for the “o” sound in question, consider the song “O Magnum Mysterium”, the Tomas Luis de Victoria version from the 16th century. Take a listen.
That prolonged “o” is not a diphthong; if it were, the singers could not keep singing “Ooooooooooooooo” like that, just as with the long i sound.