Don and Dawn have different vowels in my dialect. I can distinguish them with ease. HOWEVER, if you are from a dialect with the merger, they sound exactly the same. In that case, I need context clues to distinguish Don and Dawn.
“pwn” I’ve generally heard pronounced as “pone.” I’ve never heard “pawn.” I’ve sometimes heard “own,” but then the word would simply be “own” unless you’re reading it off something. Hence, in spoken conversation, “pone” to make the distinction.
The wikitionary audio pronunciation goes with “pone”:
Thank you. I suspect this is just me missing a subtlety of Spanish pronunciation. I think I have the same misconception about Italian - I was probably shortening the O vowel too much, as an overcompensation against using an /əʊ/ diphthong instead. For the record I use /ɒ/ when pronouncing “boss” etc. From now on I will try to avoid this when speaking Spanish and Italian.
I do know that I seem to have low sensitivity for this kind of thing - another example is that until last year, I thought “wander” and “wonder” were supposed to be pronounced exactly the same, I had never heard a difference and I still struggle to do so even when I hear it demonstrated. I don’t think this is particularly uncommon, possibly just another example of a vowel sound merger similar to those already mentioned in this thread.
I’ve been a web dev since 2000 (started part-time split among other tech duties), initially self-taught at a smallish company. I went to full-time front-end web dev at another company in 2010. Sometime between those two dates, I realized “uhh, I think I’m the only one pronouncing it ‘Earl’” and made sure I always said “you-are-ell” afterward.
It’s not a subtlety-- Both vowel sounds (or at least, vowel sounds very, very close to them) are found in English, and are clearly distinct. The vowel in Spanish “dos” is the same as in the English word “doe” (as in a deer, a female deer) or “dose” (as in a serving of medicine).
We have a family in our social circle with half siblings named Aaron and Erin. The way the mothers pronounce their names is quite different:
Jewish Polish American mother: Aaron = Ah-Eh-Ron (close as I can represent it)
Chinese American mother: Air-In
But the way the kids pronounce them they are indistinguishable to my ears and most others’ it seems. The way I say them they ARE different. Father is Irish American (but third generation New Englander). He pronounces them exactly the same too to my ears but he insists he is not pronouncing them the same.
So we are talking about a social group with very diverse linguistic backgrounds.
English lacks the mid-vowels of Spanish and Italian. The English “long o” you cited is a diphthong. It starts reasonably close to a Spanish “o,” then adds a “w.”*
If an English speaker chooses to pronounce Spanish “dos” to rhyme with “loss” or “boss,” it isn’t perfect Spanish, but it’s just as close as if he chooses to rhyme it with “close” or “morose.”
Changing the subject…thanks for correcting me on “pwn”! I thought it was pronounced “pawn,” but now I know it’s “pone.”
(*Some in the Upper Midwest use Romance-style mid-vowels in English words in certain contexts. I doubt they realize how…Mediterranean they sound. Think of someone in Fargo saying “Oh!”)
Are people unable to pronounce them differently if they’re causing confusion? If I were in an office with Dawn Jones and Don Jones, you can bet I’d start trying to call him Dahhhn.
And in fact, I did do that when I went to school out of state. I was completely interrupting a conversation every time I used certain words (“Wait, WHAT did you say? [snickering] Say it again [laughter]. Hey, guys, come in here and listen to digs. Ok, say it again!”). No mockery, they’d just never heard my accent.
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By the way, the worst Don/Dawn I’ve heard is pen/pin.
I have a friend from Georgia who’ll sometimes ask me for “an ink pen”. I asked why, and they told me how, for many people there, you write with a ‘pin’ and poke with a ‘pin’.
The pen/pin merger is one that always seems weird to me. Most of these examples, even if my dialect distinguishes between them, they still sound really, really close to me. But “pen” and “pin” sound nothing at all alike. Well, I mean, they’re both “p vowel n”, but it’s not something that I would ever confuse on hearing from another speaker of my dialect.
