Hmm, looks like “calm” vs “father” might not actually be part of the merger. Looks like the “ah” pronunciation is predominant, based on the dictionaries I checked, but my pronunciation is listed as well.
To me, it’s the difference between /ɑː/ and /ɔ:/ using IPA symbols.
No, for me, cot and caught have completely different sounds. I’m in Texas BTW.
Way back when alt.fan.cecil-adams was a thing, I sometimes hung out at alt.usage.english, so I had learned ASCII IPA, but I’ve mostly forgotten. So can you describe how you pronounce them differently? I see at the Merriam-Webster link you provided that one of the “calm” pronunciations had a variation of the letter “O”, so is that what you mean? That you say “calm” with what some people would describe as a kind of an “o” sound? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that.
I’ve described it. It’s the difference between “cah(l)m” and “caw(l)m.”
Or, here’s a recording with me saying it in my accent first, then with the sound that I use for “father” the second time around. I dropped the “l” in the second pronunciation–not sure if you normally pronounce it with the “l” or not there (some people do; some people don’t). I can re-record with the “l” pronunciation, if you’d like, but you can get a sense of the difference of the quality of vowel there.
My pronunciations were largely shaped by growing up in the south.
fɑ∂ɚ
kɑɔlm
The “a” in “calm” for us (or for me at any rate) is the same sound as the “aw” sound in “saw”; it’s not ɔ by itself (as it would be up here in New York), it’s a diphthong, ɑɔ
(and yeah, we pronounce the “l” in calm, that’s a southernism too)
Not sure if that last part is a southernism or not. In my pronunciation, I do have a hint of an “l” in there, just like I do with words like “folk,” (which I only learned a few years ago was supposed to have a silent “l” in there.)
Where I live I hear people pronounce the two names Don and Dawn the same and it drives me absolutely crazy.
It is utterly misleading in two ways:
So you get a rule that explains how “silent e” works but at the cost of embedding a lifelong misunderstanding of how the English vowel system works.
What “long i” and “short i” have in common is that they are both frequently denoted with the character <i> in English orthography. Yes, this is a system whose names only are meaningful in the context of English orthography, but so it goes. Historically, “long i” and “short i” were more closely related phonetically (as /i/ vs. /I/, in IPA), but came to their present values via the Great English Vowel Shift. And so on for all the other “long” vs. “short” vowels in this particular system of analyzing English. So there actually is some (orthographic and historical) reason to it. It does have it use; the misleading part is just the particular names “long” and “short”.
It was the later I was taught. That was nearly 40 years ago, mind.
Whew. I was having flashes of retro-embarrassment.
Studying Vowels is a big part of my vocal studies.
It’s like I’ve returned to grade school. I have to think about how I pronounce words in the lyrics. It’s amazing how harsh and jarring words can sound when sung. It often requires focusing more on the Vowels instead of the consonants to get a pleasing tone.
My voice teachers still refer to long and short vowel sounds.
Right.
In general, the problem here is that so many people assume that “vowels” are letters. They’re not. Vowels are a set of sounds that the human mouth makes within a particular language. Letters, on the other hand, are ways to represent those sounds in print.
English has from 21 to 26 or so vowels, depending on how you define and classify them. The English writing system has only five letters to represent vowels (well, six, with Y). This is why we need to use the IPA if we’re want to accurately refer to vowels in print.
When someone writes a phrase like “the A sound,” or “the long A sound,” or “the short O sound,” etc. it’s kind of pointless, because the letters A and O can represent more than just two sounds each, (because of the fossilized history of English orthography).
Letter don’t intrinsically make sounds, and neither do pixels on a screen. ALL LETTERS ARE SILENT. It’s the human mouth that produces vowels, not letters or pixels.
So it’s stupid to say, “long A,” “short O,” etc. That is just a crude tool for teaching reading, (NOT PRONUNCIATION), to children who already can speak English. If you want to write about pronunciation, USE THE IPA.
And I’ll add that using double letter, such as EE in the OP, doesn’t help the situation. It just perpetuates the problem.
Use the IPA.
I was aware of that even as I wrote it.
Thanks for your post, it makes way more sense when you put it like that.
This is interesting. I’ve never heard of that regoinalism. Not that I doubt you, just that I’m surprised.
Can you explain how the two “a” sounds differ?
In my native US west coast then later Midwestern dialect they’re identical. I *might *pronounce Stan(ley) so the “a” sound is slightly elongated in duration versus the one in Jan(et), but the sound itself seems to me to be otherwise identical. And any elongation is very, very subtle.
Yeah, I’m interested, too. “Stan” and “Jan” in my dialect are the same, as well. I can’t quite figure what the difference is. However, it looks like Wikipedia has a clue:
Not in British English. Quartz is British.
ETA: @pulykamell.
Wow. Thank you.
At first I was thinking the labels lax & tense were backwards. “Bat” being pronounced the way most Americans would, and “bath” being pronounced “baaahth” like Thurston Howell or a Brit might say. But that’s wrong.
Then I thought of the feature of NYC accents that bugs me the most. The harsh angry-seeming way they pronounce several vowels, notably the short-ish “a” sound that’s drawn out in time and emphasized and buzzy and … I don’t know what else.
Tense is how that sounds to me. Tense and course and angry and off-putting. Which I recognize is simply ignorant prejudice on my part. It’s just a vowel, an arbitrary noise we make to communicate. But still it grates.
I could readily imagine someone pronouncing Stan(ley) the tense way and Jan(et) the lax way.
The issue with the Latinate pronuciation of “i” is that the British pronunciation of Latin took a trip through the Great Vowel Shift. It wasn’t until sometime in the middle of the last Century that the British woke up and realized that they were pronouncing it differently than the rest of the world - it may have been partly an issue of British supremacy in the classical education era that kept them pronouncing Latin words as though they were English words because no one was going to tell them otherwise. Some of those pronunciations are still with us, like “alumni” or fake-latin “cacti”, as well as legal phrases that were taken from England during the period of common rule. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but there’s a few that annoy me in how they don’t conform with the standard pronunciation of Classical Latin now.