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From: "Guy Barry" <guy.ba...@blueyonder.co.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: "o" before dark "l" in British English
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We've had quite a long discussion on alt.usage.english about this.  I'm a 
speaker from southern England with a slight London accent.  I've always used 
a vowel in words like "hold" and "roll" that can probably best be 
transcribed as [A.U] - it's the same as the vowel in British "hot" but with 
a [w]-glide at the end.  This pronunciation appears to be common amongst RP 
speakers now, and even younger members of the Royal Family - see here:

http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/evidence-of-vows.html

Dictionaries and pronunciation guides, however, continue to give the older 
pronunciation /@U/ in these words, as in "hose".  The presumption in the 
cited article is that [A.U] should be regarded as an allophone of this 
vowel.

Is this the most appropriate transcription?  I make no distinction between 
the vowel in "hold" and the one in "solve".  Yet the first is conventionally 
transcribed as /@U/, the second as /A./.  Is it not more accurate to suggest 
that my dialect has a single vowel written "o" before a dark "l"?  It 
actually came as a surprise to me that these two vowels were considered 
different.  In certain words like "bolt" and "troll" it seems that either 
pronunciation is deemed acceptable anyway.  Have the two vowels not merged 
for many RP speakers?

-- 
Guy Barry