While reading the thread about starting their own alphabet, there was a link to Unifon. I never heard of it, so I went and read. I noticed on the page they have two vowel sounds, when for the ‘A’ in all, one for the ‘O’ in on.
To me, this vowel sound is the same and, when I looked it up on dictionary.com, all is spelled phonetically awl; on is spelled phonetically awn. This leads me to believe it is the same vowel sound.
What is the difference in the vowel sound that UNIFON thinks they need two letters to represent?
To me they’re very different sounds, but some people pronounce them the same. My “on” has the same vowel as “hot”, but I’ve heard some people without the low back vowel merger pronounce “on” as “awn”.
It sounds like your dialect has a “caught-cot” merger. In many English dialects, these two sounds are different – all and caught would be [ɔl] and [kɔt] (open-mid back rounded vowel); on and cot would be [ɒn] and [kɒt] (open back rounded vowel).
If you’re American, then it’s possible you’re using an unrounded low-back vowel for both: [ɑl] [ɑn] [kɑt].
The o in *on can be ahn or awn. In Merriam-Webster, the dominant pronunciation is awn /ôn/ but in Thorndike-Barnhart, the preferences are reversed. The need for a symbol for both /A/ and /O/ is more evident in a word such as *not. Pronouncing the word as nawt /nOt/ would confuse *not and *naught.
Here is the complete grapheme-phoneme table for Unifon.
Malone chose o for /A/ and x (a lambda in the Unifon script) for /O/.
I have no problem with on for ahn but I do have a problem with **or **for ahr *are. Malone was probably concerned about words such as *ball where the alternative would be bol for ball instead of bxl, where the x references an A form.
