In the instructional video we were listening to last night, the proctor kept calling it “Are Not”.
Who else besides me totally doesn’t pronounce “R Nought” the same way as “Are Not”?
Hmm, well I guess I do pronounce the “R” and “Are” part the same way.
But “not” and “naught”? Uh uh.
Naug-hut?
I assume you’d pronounce “naught” to rhyme with “caught,” “bought,” or “taught” (like “nawt”), and “not” to rhyme with “cot,” “bot,” or “tot.” They’re distinctly different to me too. Is this one of those things where some people hear/say a difference and some don’t, depending on their dialect, accent, or region?
"Not, “naught”, “cot”, “caught” all have the same vowel for me (Southern Ontario).
The cot-caught merger.
However, it would never occur to me to pronounce “R[sub]0[/sub]” as “R-naught”; “naught” is not a common word here. I would say “R-zero” or “R-sub-zero”.
Those sound the same to me, along with “knot” and the “naut” part of “nautical”
edited to add: I looked it up, I guess it is ‘ɒ’
naɔt for me.
versus nɑt for “not”
They are different for me, but I grew up in Chicago, outside the region of the cot-caught merger. In most of the western US, they are pronounced the same.
I’m in a weird state where I have the merger in my usual speech, but I do think of them as slightly different vowels in some situations. And this is one of them, due to the existence of both “naught” and “not.” And also possibly because I mostly hear “naught” in a Britiish accent, as they use it in places where Americans will more often use “zero.”
So, while I normally pronounce both words the same, I may sometimes put on an exaggerated “aw-uh” sound to make it clear I mean “naught” and not “not.” I do the same thing with “caught/cot”, but oddly not “taught/tot”–likely because I could clarify with “tater-tot” or “toddler” for the latter.
Oh, and I do say “hawty” for haughty, using the variation that actually sounds a bit upper-crust.
Your life sounds incredibly boring to me. 
That vowel merger caused me frustration when I did corporate tech support for a financial services company. Someone from a California branch called in and said that “Don (Last name)” was having blah blah issue.
I couldn’t find that name in our ticketing system. We went over it a few times until I spelled it and she said, “no, not Don! DON! D-A-W-N!”
Man, Dawn and Don do not sound alike to me at all. She probably thought I was nuts, because I said, “oh, dɔn, not dɑn! Those are so different to me.”
To a deaf person, the little complexities flap their wings noiselessly as they fly over my head.
Regarding naught: when I first started working in the civil engineering field, “naught” is used instead of zero, in certain instances. It’s an old-fashioned term, and I felt awkward using it.
It grows on you. “Naught” is typically used when describing stations on a line. “Six plus naught-naught” will put you right on station Six.
Now when you are talking about drafting tools, the ink pen tips (Rapidograph or Leroy) come in different sizes. Size One is a common size, and a lot of linework and lettering is done in Size One. If you need a finer tip the pen size you want would be “0.” But it’s not called “zero.” That is an “aught.” The tips get finer and finer as you go down to “double aught,” “triple aught,” and “four-aught.”
The four-aught pens are a BITCH to clean!
So, I spend years familiarizing myself with the terminology, and then we end up in Kentucky for Mr (then Sgt) VOW’s last duty station before retirement.
And the engineering folks in Kentucky say “zero.” :smack:
~VOW
I hear a difference in my head, and if I make a conscious effort I pronounce them differently, but I suspect that when I’m not paying attention, they come out the same. I’ll have to remember to pay attention the next time I’m not paying attention, to find out for sure.
Let me know how that works for you.
~VOW
I can feel my mouth doing different things when I say “naught” vs. “not” (or “caught” vs “cot,” or “Dawn” vs “Don,” etc.), so I suspect a lip-reader would be able to tell the difference.
Yep, it sure is. See here–
One thing I never quite figured out was the “trap-bath” split, which is prevalent in many accents in southern England especially. How do you know which words are “trap” words and which ones are “bath” words?