I didn’t think I was particularly trying to enunciate clearly there, hence my relatively rapid approach there. Anyhow, to me, the vowels are very clearly different. However, I am part of the “Mary/marry/merry” merger. I don’t particularly hear a difference between the three vowels. If I concentrate and enunciate, yes, I can hear the difference. Normally, though, they’re all the same to me. Folks who are not part of the merger have clearly noticed the difference in my dialect and corrected me (like in the names “Carrie” vs “Kerry,” which are pronounced the same in my dialect and I have to try like the dickens to pronounce them differently. But the one person I knew with the latter name --actually, “Keri”–would correct me when I pronounced it as “Carrie.”) If your dialect doesn’t make the distinction, you’re likely not to hear the difference. If yours does, it’s night-and-day.
Actually, “Aaron” vs “Erin” is another one. I pronounce those the same and can only barely hear the difference between them, though I know what the difference is.
I think it’s more complicated than just that, though. Someone here (and I’m going to get the details almost entirely wrong, unfortunately, but I think the basic idea is right) relayed a story where they attempted to pronounce a name “correctly”, and they did, but the listener (who had a different dialect) was mentally correcting for their expectation of the speaker’s dialect, and heard the pronunciation as “incorrect”. Only when the speaker said it more naturally, as they would in their native dialect, did the listener hear it as being “correct”.
All of these expectations and context-dependencies make me totally distrustful of what people say they hear. It’s the same issue with any other human sense, so it would be immensely surprising if language weren’t prone to this kind of thing. So I’m curious what a blind test would tell us.
Maybe language is an exception and all of these phonemes are precisely discernible in an absolute sense–but so far the data has mostly been in anecdote form.
We have at least one genuine linguistic expert here—Johanna—who could likely answer this question.
I think it will vary from speaker to speaker–some are more sensitive to it than others. My brain certainly “autocorrects” lots of accents, especially as I deal with all sorts of accents on a daily basis. With most phonemes, I have to concentrate and listen to accurately describe what is going on. But there are certain sounds that jump out at me immediately, like the Canadian raising in words like “about.” For some reason, I’m especially sensitive to that phoneme. I know that doesn’t help you in your search for actual data, but I’d be shocked if these phonemes are not precisely discernible among subsets of people for whom the difference is made.
The dictionary entry here is for the personal pronoun ye, which has always been pronounced as spelt. The “ye” in ‘ye olde curiosity shoppe’ is pronounced “the” as it was indeed a thorn shown as a ‘y’. It’s only the jokey or mistaken style that pronounces it yee.
markn+ already answered the clarity part, but let me answer the diacritics part: skip the diacritic marks, it’s an additional level of detail. Most phonologists will, unless they are specifically discussing variations on a specific sound within a specific language; dictionary entries which included all the diacritic-marked variants of English would need to list so many possible varieties that it would be unmanageable, so they stay at that lower level of detail.
I know I’m arriving way too late for this thread, but my two cents are that the OP is asking the wrong question. In this case, we know that the pronunciation came first, long before the English spelling. Given that the pronunciation was much older, a better starting point question to ask would be: Why is ‘Odin’ spelled like it is?
You’re probably right, but at this point neither question is ever going to be answered.
Regarding the cot/caught merger
There are two unambiguous sounds regardless of context. However, there are not necessarily two sounds regardless of the speaker – the speaker either has to be a native speaker of a non-merging English-language dialect, or has to be someone sufficiently exposed in some other way to a dialect (or language) that distinguishes the two vowel sounds. Focused phonetics training (say, through vocal training, singing, phonetics course in college) can also make the different vowels clearer and more salient in one’s head.
While the bolded is in a broad sense true, it’s much more a matter of dialectal perspective. People who speak a non-merging dialect natively don’t have to work or apply extra concentration to make out a difference between *cot *and caught. For those people, the difference is entirely salient in almost all natural speech environments. But for any listeners who speak a merging dialect, those differences are simply not perceived without prompting, familiarization, and/or training. Non-mergers will pronounce the differences, and you simply will not hear it.
It’s essentially the same thing as when many native Latin American speakers don’t initially perceive a difference between English “beef” and “Biff”. There are speakers from other language communities who wouldn’t pick up a difference between the vowels in American English “look” and “Luke”, or “book” and “boot”. Native English speakers have similar issues when learning other languages, often even after fluency is obtained.
Yes, the same is true for American English speakers of non-merging dialects .
For American English speakers of non-merging dialects (of which I am one) … I believe we’ll always hear our version of “cot” when you say “caught”. You and I do say “cot” essentially the same way. I’m not aware that the reverse is ever the case.
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judʒ
========
aI dont rIlI ʌndɚstand hwʌt ∂ǝ prɑblǝm iz.
ai mIn ju lɚnd iŋlIʃ hwItʃ hæz ɛ hɑribǝl mætʃ bitwin saʊnd ænd simbǝl. Haʊ mʌtʃ hɑrdɚ tu lɚn simbǝlz ∂æt du mætʃʔ wʊn saund, wʊn simbǝl.
[I don’t understand what the problem is
I mean, you learned English which has a horrible match between sound and symbol. How much harder to learn symbols that do match? One sound one symbol]
It also took us several years to learn English spelling, and many of us still don’t get it right.
Yes, IPA is valuable. But expecting everyone to learn it, and playing it off as some really easy thing simply because it was easy for you, doesn’t really work.
I’ve been using IPA for years, and am fairly comfortable with it. But I still wind up looking up symbols at times–the ones I don’t use often. I’ll forget which front rounded vowel is which, forget any of the clicks, and often forget the diacritics. If IPA could be learned as quickly as people say, this shouldn’t be a problem for me, after all these years. But it is.
I’m not saying it’s not valuable. I actually propose using it when it is clear, and throwing it in with other explanations or a small key when appropriate. But I’m not going to keep insisting people who aren’t into any of the fields where it is useful for have to learn it just to have a casual conversation.
And, honestly, for English, English approximations are good enough 90% of the time–and the times when they aren’t are also the times where amateurs are more likely to mess up the IPA and do it wrong. For example, if you have the cot/caught merger, you are more likely to use the wrong symbol in describing people’s accent that don’t, because you just don’t automatically hear those sounds as different.
I still don’t really know the difference between /ɑ/ and /ɒ/–no clue which words use which, and I forget which is which. And that is because they have no distinction in my accent.
It wouldn’t help you unless you know you are familiar with the accent/English variant of the person posting. And mostly you don’t know what that is, never mind whether you are familiar with it.
At best, it would give you a sense that you understood what sound was intended which might be completely wrong, and you’d have no way of finding out whether it was wrong or not. With IPA, if you don’t recognise the symbol, you can look it up. With some other poster’s idiosyncratic attempt to represent the sound, there’s nowhere you can look up what sounds he intends by what he has written.
[del]Reported.[/del] Sarcasm is not condoned in a GQ thread, especially when OP’s question hasn’t yet been answered. ETA: (Ooops; Report rescinded, assuming statute of limitations for this offense is less than seven years.)
One point only naita touched on, is that Icelandic should be used when hoping for Old Norse pronunciation. (Hasn’t the consonant in ‘Odin’ mutated to ‘D’ in other modern Scandinavian languages?)
On the cot/caught thing - here are a few words which, in my dialect, have the same vowel as ‘cot’:
Got, snot, log, Bob, rock, odd, cough, from, on, top, boss
And these are some with the same vowel as ‘caught’:
Ought, hawk, dawn, ball, bawl, brawl, audio, hawse,caw (not to mention store, warm, born and so on, but I’ll try not to poker the rhotic/non-rhotic bear too much…)
If absolutely all those words sound like the same vowel to you, then I guess you won’t pick up the difference between me saying cot or caught, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference when you said them, but I’d certainly pick up the difference immediately when somebody with my own accent said them
For those who want to hear words rather than learn IPA, it’s often possible to find audio files. For example, from Wiktionary.Org:
‘caught’ in Received Pronunciation [kʰoːt].
‘caught’ in Australia [k̠ʰoːt].
‘caught’ in US-Inland North [kʰɔt].
‘caught’ in US with cot-caught merge [kʰɑt].
I always thought of myself as fully merged, but testing just now I think my mouth moves slightly differently for ‘cough’ as compared with ‘coff.’ I’m not sure the sound difference is discernable. And the different mouth movement may be a recent artifact from reading so often about the caught-cot merger! :o
You think that the pronunciation of Odin is weird? And you’re surprised that it’s not pronounced the way we’ve “always” pronounced it? Consider another Head God.
The Roman god Jove is usually pronounced with that English “J” sound as in “James”, and a “hard” “V” as in “Violet”, but, as I learned in my Latin classes, the “J” should be a “Y” sound and the “v” a soft sound like “W”, meaning that it should be “Yoh- way”. This makes it almost identical to the way the Hebrew deity “Yahweh” is pronounced.
This one is of particular interest to my family. My daughter (in NJ) is Erin and my nephew (in TN) is Aaron. When we visited TN all sorts of confusion ensued. It got so bad that some relatives took to saying “the boy Aaron” or “the girl Erin”.
I hadn’t realized that I killed this thread three years ago 
Interesting. All the “caughts” are the same as mine, but your “cots” are different. “Log,” “cough,” and “boss,” for me, are in the “caught” category. “From” is just completely a different vowel (/ʌ/) that rhymes with “thumb” in my dialect.