ascenray, do you have a clip of someone saying [g[sup]h[/sup]]? I’m having the hardest time aspirating a sound that starts so far back and keeping it voiced. The closest I can get to is to say ghost as, well, [ghost].
BTW, I pronounce the l in balk. I say /bɒlk/. I’ve always wondered where the /l/ went in the other words you mentioned.
And that mean…? 
Well, I don’t really distinguish between cot and caught.
I admit the l is a bit like the r for non-rhotic Brits. I kinda fades and is less pronounced than in, say, bald.
Tock and talk sound different to me. The lk combination is kinda hard to say, which is why it fades. But it still colors the word.
But maybe it’s like Minnesotans and North Dakotans saying their vowels.
“He went oot and aboot.” (Out and about).
“That’s not what it sounds like at all.”
Um, yes it is.
(In other words, if you’re not conditioned to say the distinction, you probably don’t hear it either.)
Listen to the audio clips!
Even though you merge caught and cot, the difference between talk and tock for you could be the same as the distinction that CINCers make between caught and cot - [tɔk] and [tɒk].
I haven’t come up with a clip yet.
I know someone who pronounces the l in caulk too.
Watch out now – besides the [fɑːðɚ]/[bɒðɚ] folks, there’s also us Louisianians that pronounce them [fɔːðɚ]/[bɒðɚ] 
I didn’t know about that one. I haven’t had much opportunity to listen to Louisiana accents.
Yup, that’s how my half-Pakistani friend says it, too (and she has relatives in Afghanistan).
Speaking of JFK, one of most cringeworthy mispronunciations of a country name by a president was when he ponounced Laos as “LAY-os”.
Hank Hill: So are you Chinese or Japanese?
Minh Souphanousinphone: No, we are Laotian.
Bill Dauterive: The ocean? What ocean?
Khan Souphanousinphone: From Laos, stupid! It’s a landlocked country in South East Asia between Vietnam and Thailand, population approximately 4.7 million!
…
Hank Hill: So are you Chinese or Japanese?
Khan Souphanousinphone:: D’oh!
How is it supposed to be pronounced?
The American pronunciation begins the same way, but ends completely differently.
They don’t say Pakistahn over here; they say Pack-is-tan (as in, the coloring you get from the sun).
Or a lifetime of pedantry.
It’s a near homophone with “louse” – I’ll leave it to the experts to tweak the differences.
Midway through this thread, it occurred to me that the different language groups in Afghanistan might pronounce it differently, although I have nothing to back up that this actually happens. My original assertion that that’s how Afghanis say it is based on the fact that I’ve heard it said that way by Afghanis, and that’s how my Persian teacher says it, too.
Persian is very, very closely related to Dari. (Dari is often described as a dialect of Persian, although my knowledge is so limited that it’s impossible for me to give an opinion. My Persian teacher would occasionally go off on a little spiel in what was apparently an imitation of how Afghanis speak and then laugh at how funny it sounded. Also, my Persian teacher is off his rocker and once threatened to eat us if we didn’t do our homework.)
Persian is also extremely similar to Tajik, one of the other major language groups in Afghanistan.
However, it is more distantly related to Pashto, the other main language in Afghanistan. So they might say it differently.
I’m a bit out of my depth here, so please feel free to correct me if I’m getting anything wrong.
I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I did learn IPA in college.
The native pronunciation is [láːw]. The s was added in French, to indicate it was three countries combined as one. Neither the French nor the Lao pronounce the s. However, when it was taken to English, the s was pronounced. This pretty much leaves the closes English equivalent to /laʊs/, i.e., the exact same as the pronunciation of the word louse.
Wikipedia, however, gives a slightly different pronunciation, by pronouncing each individual letter. It comes out [lɑːoʊs], or Lah-ohss. I think the pronunciation given above is closer.
Finally, the main difference between the two pronunciations I give in the first paragraph is that the Lao language is tonal, and the [a] is higher in pitch. The other difference is that [w] is a consonant, as Lao does not have the diphthongs of English. Basically the mouth closes a lot more than for [ʊ].
Easy there…
Tajiks in Afghanistan speak Dari :). Insomuch as Tajik as a separate language from Dari exists, the term is used in ex-Soviet Central Asia ( i.e. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan ), where the written script used is Cyrillic.
acsenray said:
I spent a year in high school learning Spanish (and had better consistency in pronunciation than my teacher), but I still struggle with keeping the sounds right. You really think I’m going to pick up that a sideways horseshoe symbol means “awh” versus “aaah” vs “ayeuh” in an hour of study?
acsenray said:
My response: “There’s clearly an L there, why aren’t you saying it?”
sqweels said"
Well, they are La-oceans (Laotians), so why wouldn’t that be from Lay-os?
But that’s still trumped by “Cuber”.
I agree somewhat but he still says ‘Eye Rack’ and ‘Eye Ran’ 
Ah, okay, that makes sense. I knew that Tajik in Tajikistan is written in Cyrillic (which is crazy…but convenient for me since I can read Cyrillic better than I can Arabic script), but I didn’t realize it’s equivalent to Dari. Thanks!