Pronunciation of "Aunt"

[Berkeley Brett]

I hope you are all well & in good spirits.

In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".

The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.

I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking world.

Thanks for anything you may care to share....

--
Brett (in Berkeley, California, USA)
On Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/BerkeleyBrett
(You don't have to be a Twitter user to view this stream of ideas!)

[contrex]

Arnt (SW England)

[musika]

On 23/04/2014 20:04, Berkeley Brett wrote:
> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking world.
> Thanks for anything you may care to share....

The two English pronunciations I know are "ant" and "ahnt".
I use "ant" and "anti".
Never heard of "awnt".
--
Ray
UK

[Nathan Sanders]

On 2014-04-23 19:04:33 +0000, Berkeley Brett said:

> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most
> people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as
> "antie".
>
> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt"
> (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American
> community.
>
> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the
> English-speaking world.
>
> Thanks for anything you may care to share....

I grew up in NW Georgia and use [&nt] (rhymes with "ant"), except for
one particular great-aunt, who I called [eint] (rhymes with "paint")
when using it with her name. That is, I would say "[eint] Doris is my
[&nt]".

This question was part of Bert Vaux's Dialect Survey for American English:

<http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_1.html>

[&nt] is by far the most common across the US (75% of respondents), but
there is a strong pocket of [Ant] or [A.nt] (12%) concentrated in the
northeast.

Nathan

--
Department of Linguistics
Swarthmore College
http://sanders.phonologist.org

[bill van]

In article <a5ac3157-8cc2-4420...@googlegroups.com>,

Berkeley Brett <roya...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people
> pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
>
> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which
> seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>
> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the
> English-speaking world.
>
> Thanks for anything you may care to share....

In the English-speaking parts of Canada I know (Ontario to British
Columbia), aunt generally rhymes with ant, as in California. But we have
enough people from other English-speaking countries that the "ahnt" or
"awnt" pronunciation is not unusual.
--
bill

[Ross]

I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
"awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?

I think there are just two pronunciations in question here: the one where "aunt" = "ant" /&nt/, which is most common in North America; and the other one. I think that one should be /ant/ in ASCII IPA, but I welcome correction. The /ant/ version prevails in England, and New Zealand, and probably Australia too.

I don't think anybody actually says "awnt" (/Ont/?)

The /ant/ version is the result of the same sound change that produces different vowels in "can" and "can't". The North American colonists mostly missed out on this change, which also explains the different vowels in "grass", "bath", "dance" etc.

I'd be interested to know more about those African-Americans mentioned by BB. Possibly from the Caribbean?

[Oliver Cromm]

* Berkeley Brett:

> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA),
> most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not
> frequently used) as "antie".
>
> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as
> "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the
> African-American community.

Correct as in "spelling pronunciation"? Like "forehead"="fore
head" etc.? In many other cases that is considered a sign that the
pronunciation is not known, but guessed from the spelling.

> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the
> English-speaking world.
>
> Thanks for anything you may care to share....

I noticed that Nanny Fran's mother says "awnt", which I hadn't
heard much before. She's supposed to be from a Jewish family in
Queens, New York, her mother being an immigrant, but I don't know
how typical this pronunciation is in real life.

--
Strategy: A long-range plan whose merit cannot be evaluated
until sometime after those creating it have left the organization.

[Ross]

On Thursday, April 24, 2014 10:00:54 AM UTC+12, Ross wrote:
> On Thursday, April 24, 2014 9:20:27 AM UTC+12, bill van wrote:
>
> > In article <a5ac3157-8cc2-4420...@googlegroups.com>,

> I don't think anybody actually says "awnt" (/Ont/?)

I was wrong. The survey linked by Nathan shows 2.77% of American respondents using the "caught" vowel (choice c.) -- mostly on the east coast, but scattered elsewhere.

(These would be people who distinguish "ah" from "caught", since there's another category (d) for those who don't.)

[Jerry Friedman]

On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
> On Thursday, April 24, 2014 9:20:27 AM UTC+12, bill van wrote:
> > In article <a5ac3157-8cc2-4420...@googlegroups.com>,
> > Berkeley Brett <roya...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
> > > In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people > > pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
>
> > > The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which
> > > seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
> > > I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the
> > > English-speaking world.
>
> > > Thanks for anything you may care to share....
>
> > In the English-speaking parts of Canada I know (Ontario to British
> > Columbia), aunt generally rhymes with ant, as in California. But we have
> > enough people from other English-speaking countries that the "ahnt" or
> > "awnt" pronunciation is not unusual.
>
> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?

You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
"aunt".

> I think there are just two pronunciations in question here: the one where "aunt" = "ant" /&nt/, which is most common in North America; and the other one. I think that one should be /ant/ in ASCII IPA, but I welcome correction.

/Ant/. ASCII IPA uses /a/ for English only in the diphthongs /aI/ and /aU/.
As you can see, it makes no attempt to economize on symbols.

(On the other hand, you can use ASCII IPA [a] in, say, northern English
"cat", Chicago "job", and ['ha:v@d ya:d]. Unless I've messed up // and
[] again.)

ASCII IPA is exactly what it says it is, and the recommended usage is a
lot like the pronunciations in the OED, if that helps.

> The /ant/ version prevails in England, and New Zealand, and probably Australia too.
>
> I don't think anybody actually says "awnt" (/Ont/?)

I'm sure I've heard /Ont/, but with American versions of the diaphoneme
/O/, many of which are noticeably different from, say, RP, and
undoubtedly from cardinal [O]. My version of /O/ might sound a lot
like /A/ to Brits. (I'm not talking about New Zealanders because I
don't understand their vowel shift.)

> The /ant/ version is the result of the same sound change that produces different vowels in "can" and "can't". The North American colonists mostly missed out on this change, which also explains the different vowels in "grass", "bath", "dance" etc.

But it's a spelling pronunciation, possibly influenced by the traditional
British pronunciation, which for a lot of Americans doesn't sound that
different.

> I'd be interested to know more about those African-Americans mentioned by BB. Possibly from the Caribbean?

People of longstanding U.S. ancestry, in my experience.

--
Jerry Friedman

[bill van]

In article <c04105fd-6eb9-42f0...@googlegroups.com>,

Ross <benl...@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

> On Thursday, April 24, 2014 9:20:27 AM UTC+12, bill van wrote:
> > In article <a5ac3157-8cc2-4420...@googlegroups.com>,

> > In the English-speaking parts of Canada I know (Ontario to British
> > Columbia), aunt generally rhymes with ant, as in California. But we have
> > enough people from other English-speaking countries that the "ahnt" or
> > "awnt" pronunciation is not unusual.
>
> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?

Yes, they're meant to sound the same. Both had previously been used in
this thread and I haven't learned ASCII IPA, which I'm beginning to
think might be useful if I continue to read aue. As a first step, I have
located:

http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml
--
bill

[Ross]

On Thursday, April 24, 2014 11:21:52 AM UTC+12, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>
> > I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
> > reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
> > three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
> > have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
> > "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>
> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
> "aunt".

Yes,some do, as I subsequently learned by looking at the Vaux survey
linked by Nathan.

> I think there are just two pronunciations in question here: the one where "aunt" = "ant" /&nt/, which is most common in North America; and the other one. I think that one should be /ant/ in ASCII IPA, but I welcome correction.
>
> /Ant/. ASCII IPA uses /a/ for English only in the diphthongs /aI/ and /aU/.
> As you can see, it makes no attempt to economize on symbols.

Thank you. I tried to get it from the Wikipedia "Kirshenbaum" article,
but that does not include English examples.

>(On the other hand, you can use ASCII IPA [a] in, say, northern English
> "cat", Chicago "job", and ['ha:v@d ya:d]. Unless I've messed up // and
> [] again.)
>
> ASCII IPA is exactly what it says it is, and the recommended usage is a
> lot like the pronunciations in the OED, if that helps.

Not too much, since we have the new Upton/Kretschmar pronunciations alongside
hangovers from the old regime. Eg. for "aunt", the only pronunciation offered
is /a:nt/.

> > The /ant/ version prevails in England, and New Zealand, and probably Australia too.
>
> I don't think anybody actually says "awnt" (/Ont/?)
>
> I'm sure I've heard /Ont/, but with American versions of the diaphoneme
> /O/, many of which are noticeably different from, say, RP, and
> undoubtedly from cardinal [O]. My version of /O/ might sound a lot
> like /A/ to Brits. (I'm not talking about New Zealanders because I
> don't understand their vowel shift.)

Actually very much like RP in this respect. Our funny vowel shift is mainly
in the short vowels. NZEng has the /&/ --> /A/ shift pretty consistently in
the words where RP has it. The reason I was cautious about including Australia
is that there are some instances of /&/ surviving in the odd word
there, sometimes with variation from city to city.

> > The /ant/ version is the result of the same sound change that produces different vowels in "can" and "can't". The North American colonists mostly missed out on this change, which also explains the different vowels in "grass", "bath", "dance" etc.
>
> But it's a spelling pronunciation, possibly influenced by the traditional
> British pronunciation, which for a lot of Americans doesn't sound that
> different.

Aha. I had been thinking of it as a remnant Briticism, like r-lessness in NY and Boston.

> > I'd be interested to know more about those African-Americans mentioned by BB. Possibly from the Caribbean?
>
> People of longstanding U.S. ancestry, in my experience.

OK, makes more sense if it is a spelling pronunciation which has come up
in various places. That might also account for /Ont/, which my chief NZ
informant has never heard, an I'm guessing nobody in the UK would say either.
It is spelled like "taunt" and "haunt" and "flaunt", after all.

[Ross]

Ah! That's what I should have looked at. I haven't used ASCII IPA a great deal, so I have to look things up. But I think it will be very useful in a discussion like this.

As you will also see from my exchange with Jerry, I may have been wrong
about the historical connection between North American /Ant/~/Ont/ and the
phonetically similar British pronunciation.

[Steve Hayes]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 12:04:33 -0700 (PDT), Berkeley Brett <roya...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
>In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) >

>The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American
>

>I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking world.
>
>Thanks for anything you may care to share....

I pronounce "aunt" as a homophone if "aren't".

But I believe that the older pronunciation as "ant".

BTW please fix your line lengths.



--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Steve Hayes]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Jerry Friedman
<jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>
>You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>"aunt".

Ornt?

[micky]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 12:04:33 -0700 (PDT), Berkeley Brett
<roya...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
>In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
>
>The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>
>I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking world.
>
>Thanks for anything you may care to share....

I'm not going to try to distinguish awnt and ahnt. I'm almost certain I
know what you mean. It's the same in Baltimore afaihnoticed. Blacks
very often say awnt. Whether this is a southern accent or a black
accent, I don't know. In many cases, they are the same, but far more
blacks moved north during WWII and thereafter, for better jobs, than did
white people, who mostly had decent jobs.

My college roommate one year was a poly sci grad student who had worked
the previous summer (1969) for the depart of Health, Education, and
Welfare, during the Nixon administration. They did a study to find out
how long blacks on welfare lived in the north before they went on
welfare. (Not during wwii, when few if any went on welfare after
moving north, but during the years just before 1969.) Their expectation
was that higher welfare payments in northern states were the reason that
blacks moved north. But the study showed that the average length of
time from moving until applying for welfare was about 6 months. Plainly,
if they had moved for welfare, they wouldn't have waited 6 months to
apply. Instead they were taking the best job they could find and
hoping to get a better job later, but instead some lost the job they
had. Anyhow, the study didn't show what the administration thought
it would, so it was never released.

--
Please say where you live, or what
area's English you are asking about.
So your question or answer makes sense.
. .
I have lived all my life in the USA,
Western Pa. Indianapolis, Chicago,
Brooklyn, Baltimore.

[DavidW]

Stefan Ram wrote:
> contrex <mike.j...@gmail.com> writes:
>> Arnt (SW England)
>
> Is it possible that, when a US speaker now pronounces
> �arnt�, he will hear the US pronunciation of �arnt�
> (rhotic?), not necessarily your SW England pronunciation
> of �arnt� (non-rhotic?)?

Yes, I'd guess that an American is likely to sound the 'r' seeing that.

P.S. The word 'rhotic' is new to me. Thanks.

[Peter Moylan]

On 24/04/14 09:54, Ross wrote:
> On Thursday, April 24, 2014 11:21:52 AM UTC+12, Jerry Friedman
> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:

>> I think there are just two pronunciations in question here: the one
>> where "aunt" = "ant" /&nt/, which is most common in North America;
>> and the other one. I think that one should be /ant/ in ASCII IPA,
>> but I welcome correction.
>>
>> /Ant/. ASCII IPA uses /a/ for English only in the diphthongs /aI/
>> and /aU/. As you can see, it makes no attempt to economize on
>> symbols.

It's a good thing that it doesn't economise, because that makes it
easier to distinguish a larger range of sounds without having to add
extra markup. For example, it lets me say that I have a different vowel
in "pasta" [pasta] from that in "aunt" [Ant]. (And they're both
different from the /k&t/ vowel.)

> Actually very much like RP in this respect. Our funny vowel shift is
> mainly in the short vowels. NZEng has the /&/ --> /A/ shift pretty
> consistently in the words where RP has it. The reason I was cautious
> about including Australia is that there are some instances of /&/
> surviving in the odd word there, sometimes with variation from city
> to city.

Perhaps not from city to city, but certainly from state to state. For
example, the Australian pronunciation of "dance" varies between states.

--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 7:54:45 PM UTC-4, Ross wrote:

> Aha. I had been thinking of it as a remnant Briticism,
> like r-lessness in NY and Boston.

How can NY and Boston r-lessness be a "remnant Briticism," given that
NY and Boston -- and Philadelphia -- were settled well before r got
lost in a small part of southeastern England?

[Ross]

The short answer would be that it could very well have spread to those areas well after their initial settlement. I remember being taught long ago that the fact that the change was confined to these cities (also Charleston, I believe) and their immediate hinterlands, and had never spread very far inland, was to be explained by their being major seaports and thus open to influence from overseas.

When r-dropping came up here (or on sci.lang) a while ago, I was unable to find anything very definite about the chronology of the change in America.

So is it your opinion that the change in these cities was a completely independent local innovation, having nothing to do with the more or less contemporary change in England?

[Robert Bannister]

On 24/04/2014 3:04 am, Berkeley Brett wrote:
> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
>
> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>
> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking world.
>
> Thanks for anything you may care to share....
>

South-east England and RP use "ahnt" [A:nt]. The Midlands and North use
"ant" [&nt]. I'm not sure about the West.

I'm also not certain about the whole of Australia, but I would say it
was the "dance" vowel which varies widely from place to place. Here it
seems to be somewhere between [E:] and [&:] - neither of the IPA sound
files seem to be the right vowel. I'm pretty sure most of you use a
shorter vowel over East.

--
Robert Bannister - 1940-71 SE England
1972-now W Australia

[Robert Bannister]

On 24/04/2014 7:21 am, Jerry Friedman wrote:

> I'm sure I've heard /Ont/, but with American versions of the diaphoneme
> /O/, many of which are noticeably different from, say, RP, and
> undoubtedly from cardinal [O]. My version of /O/ might sound a lot
> like /A/ to Brits. (I'm not talking about New Zealanders because I
> don't understand their vowel shift.)

I always thought Swedes speaking English sounded posh purely because
their [A] sounded more like [O] to me. In practice, in England, the /A/
is a bit more back and central. Thus, [O] sounded like a proper, RP [A]
to me.

[Robert Bannister]

On 24/04/2014 6:44 am, Oliver Cromm wrote:
> * Berkeley Brett:
>
>> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>>
>> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA),
>> most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not
>> frequently used) as "antie".
>>
>> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as
>> "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the
>> African-American community.
>
> Correct as in "spelling pronunciation"? Like "forehead"="fore
> head" etc.? In many other cases that is considered a sign that the
> pronunciation is not known, but guessed from the spelling.

It seems unlikely to me that family members would acquire spelling
pronunciations. I suppose some families have no living aunts, but surely
enough do to make the word pretty common.

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/23/14 5:54 PM, Ross wrote:
> On Thursday, April 24, 2014 11:21:52 AM UTC+12, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>>
>>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>>
>> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>> "aunt".
>
> Yes,some do, as I subsequently learned by looking at the Vaux survey
> linked by Nathan.

Yeah. I meant that cot-is-not-caught Americans who don't say "ant" say
"awnt". As I recall.

> > I think there are just two pronunciations in question here: the one where "aunt" = "ant" /&nt/, which is most common in North America; and the other one. I think that one should be /ant/ in ASCII IPA, but I welcome correction.
>>
>> /Ant/.

My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking about.)

>> ASCII IPA uses /a/ for English only in the diphthongs /aI/ and /aU/.
>> As you can see, it makes no attempt to economize on symbols.

Well, not "no attempt", but it could have tried harder to economize on
phoneme symbols.

> Thank you. I tried to get it from the Wikipedia "Kirshenbaum" article,
> but that does not include English examples.

...

I see Bill has directed you to a better site.

>> ASCII IPA is exactly what it says it is, and the recommended usage is a
>> lot like the pronunciations in the OED, if that helps.
>
> Not too much, since we have the new Upton/Kretschmar pronunciations alongside
> hangovers from the old regime. Eg. for "aunt", the only pronunciation offered
> is /a:nt/.

What I meant was that the approach to (dia)phonemes is similar. Both
try to represent phonemes with IPA symbols that represent the sounds
rather than economizing on symbols. For instance, I believe the OED
uses the equivalents of /a/ for TRAP and /A:/ for CALM, though they
could use /a/ and /a:/ or /a/ and /A/. There are differences in detail,
though. The ASCII IPA pages recommend /&/ for TRAP.

>>> The /ant/ version prevails in England, and New Zealand, and probably Australia too.
>>
> > I don't think anybody actually says "awnt" (/Ont/?)
>>
>> I'm sure I've heard /Ont/, but with American versions of the diaphoneme
>> /O/, many of which are noticeably different from, say, RP, and
>> undoubtedly from cardinal [O]. My version of /O/ might sound a lot
>> like /A/ to Brits. (I'm not talking about New Zealanders because I
>> don't understand their vowel shift.)
>
> Actually very much like RP in this respect. Our funny vowel shift is mainly
> in the short vowels. NZEng has the /&/ --> /A/ shift pretty consistently in
> the words where RP has it. The reason I was cautious about including Australia
> is that there are some instances of /&/ surviving in the odd word
> there, sometimes with variation from city to city.

I left you guys out because I couldn't guess how your vowel shift would
affect how my /O/ would sound to you.

>>> The /ant/ version is the result of the same sound change that produces different vowels in "can" and "can't". The North American colonists mostly missed out on this change, which also explains the different vowels in "grass", "bath", "dance" etc.
>>
>> But it's a spelling pronunciation, possibly influenced by the traditional
>> British pronunciation, which for a lot of Americans doesn't sound that
>> different.
>
> Aha. I had been thinking of it as a remnant Briticism, like r-lessness in NY and Boston.

...

I was too confident in saying it's a spelling pronunciation, but I think
that's at least a strong possibility.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/23/14 7:18 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Jerry Friedman
> <jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>>
>> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>> "aunt".
>
> Ornt?

Haven't we been through this?

Short answer: yes, for some non-rhotic New Yorkers, and some of them
even have a THOUGHT vowel much like RP. On the other hand, I'm from
Cleveland, Ohio; my THOUGHT vowel doesn't sound much like my NORTH/FORCE
vowel, and I have an /r/ in the latter two classes but not in THOUGHT.

See http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/01/aw-shucks.html

including Lazar's answers to my questions.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Guy Barry]

"Berkeley Brett" wrote in message
news:a5ac3157-8cc2-4420...@googlegroups.com...

>
>I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
>In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most
>people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as
>"antie".
>
>The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which
>seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>
>I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the
>English-speaking world.

This is the type of question where respelling is next to useless, because
respellings that work in one person's dialect are highly likely to be
misunderstood in another person's. I've read briefly though the thread and
seen people saying things like "I pronounce it like 'aren't'". "Aunt" and
"aren't" are indeed homophones for me, but I know that it's useless my
saying so since many readers here pronounce the "r" in "aren't". Similarly
there's no point in my saying "I rhyme 'aunt' with 'can't'", because I don't
know how other readers will say "can't".

I pronounce it roughly like this (standard RP):

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/aunt

The ASCII IPA transcription is /A:nt/, with the same vowel as in "father".
In the local dialect round here though (west of England), it's more like
/&nt/ or even /&:nt/ (roughly homophonous with "ant").

I don't know what you mean by the spelling "awnt". If you mean /O:nt/
(which would rhyme with "taunt" in my dialect), I've never heard anything
like that, even though it would reflect the usual pronunciation of the
digraph "au". But I don't know whether you have the cot-caught merger or
not, or even whether it's relevant here.

--
Guy Barry

[Guy Barry]

"bill van" wrote in message
news:billvan-4302BA...@news.shawcable.net...

If you want to make sensible contributions to a thread like this one, most
definitely! In my experience it's impossible to discuss this type of issue
using respelling. The only alternative is sound files on sites like Forvo
(which can be very useful).

>As a first step, I have located:
>
>http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml

Yes, that's the guide I use and would recommend. (Just be careful with your
slashes and square brackets.)

--
Guy Barry

[Guy Barry]

"DavidW" wrote in message news:lj9r17$ffg$1...@speranza.aioe.org...

Very commonly used in pronunciation discussions on this group. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_and_non-rhotic_accents#Rhotic_and_non-rhotic_accents_in_English

Incidentally, there are a lot of rhotic speakers in south-west England
(though presumably not the one who posted above).

--
Guy Barry

[Steve Hayes]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 23:13:41 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>

wrote:

>On 4/23/14 7:18 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Jerry Friedman
>> <jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>>>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>>>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>>>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>>>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>>>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>>>
>>> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>>> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>>> "aunt".
>>
>> Ornt?
>
>Haven't we been through this?

Yes, we have.

But all I am sure of as a result if the reiteration is that whatever the "aw"
sound means to Americans who do or don't have it, it is completely different
from the "aw" sound as I use it.

>Short answer: yes, for some non-rhotic New Yorkers, and some of them
>even have a THOUGHT vowel much like RP. On the other hand, I'm from
>Cleveland, Ohio; my THOUGHT vowel doesn't sound much like my NORTH/FORCE
>vowel, and I have an /r/ in the latter two classes but not in THOUGHT.
>
>See http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/01/aw-shucks.html
>
>including Lazar's answers to my questions.

I think the only way to resolve the question is to go here:

http://www.forvo.com/word/aunt/#en

FWIW I think my pronunciation agrees with the one at the top of the list
(anakat).

[Guy Barry]

"Steve Hayes" wrote in message
news:98mhl9ph910s4uocg...@4ax.com...

>I think the only way to resolve the question is to go here:
>
>http://www.forvo.com/word/aunt/#en
>
>FWIW I think my pronunciation agrees with the one at the top of the list
>(anakat).

Mine too. Interesting that three of the US speakers chose to give two
alternative pronunciations.

--
Guy Barry

[Peter Moylan]

On 24/04/14 14:55, Jerry Friedman wrote:

>>> /Ant/.
>
> My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
> marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking
> about.)

Actually, a short vowel is often used when the following word starts
with a vowel. So it's [A:nt d@nis] but [Ant Edn@].

I have several times argued in this group that vowel length is phonemic
in AusE, with the obvious example being the difference between "can"
(the verb) and "can" (the container).

Just recently I noticed an AUE regular, an AmE speaker as I recall it,
saying that he too has a pronunciation difference between "can" and
"can". (Sorry, I've forgotten who it was.) So perhaps there are at least
some dialects of AmE where length matters.

Clarification: the verb "can" is pronounced [k@n] when followed by an
infinitive, in both AmE and AusE, but that's not the difference I'm
talking about. Further, I'm not talking about the [kIn] that occurs in
some AmE dialects. I'm referring to the difference between "Yes I [k&n]"
and "It's in the [k&:n]".

[Peter Moylan]

On 24/04/14 19:48, Steve Hayes wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 23:13:41 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 4/23/14 7:18 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Jerry Friedman
>>> <jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>>>>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>>>>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>>>>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>>>>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>>>>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>>>>
>>>> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>>>> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>>>> "aunt".
>>>
>>> Ornt?
>>
>> Haven't we been through this?
>
> Yes, we have.
>
> But all I am sure of as a result if the reiteration is that whatever the "aw"
> sound means to Americans who do or don't have it, it is completely different
> from the "aw" sound as I use it.

That's an interesting point. We sometimes accuse Americans of have a
shortage of vowels, and that's probably true of west-coast Americans. On
the other hand, it appears that some Americans have three different "aw"
vowels, and I'm not sure that I could pick the difference.

[Peter Moylan]

I've never really mastered Swedish vowels, but I do get the impression
that Swedes put a ring on the top of their "A" when speaking English.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Thursday, April 24, 2014 12:00:23 AM UTC-4, Ross wrote:
> On Thursday, April 24, 2014 2:55:18 PM UTC+12, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 7:54:45 PM UTC-4, Ross wrote:

> > > Aha. I had been thinking of it as a remnant Briticism,
> > > like r-lessness in NY and Boston.
> > How can NY and Boston r-lessness be a "remnant Briticism," given that
> > NY and Boston -- and Philadelphia -- were settled well before r got
> > lost in a small part of southeastern England?
>
> The short answer would be that it could very well have spread to those areas well after their initial settlement. I remember being taught long ago that the fact that the change was confined to these cities (also Charleston, I believe) and their immediate hinterlands, and had never spread very far inland, was to be explained by their being major seaports and thus open to influence from overseas.
>
> When r-dropping came up here (or on sci.lang) a while ago, I was unable to find anything very definite about the chronology of the change in America.

As the historian (not even a linguist!) David Hackett Fischer shows in
*Albion's Seed*, the four main dialect divisions in the US derive from
the fact that the first four major settlements on the land were from
different parts of England -- and the dialect distinctions are matched
by distinction in a couple dozen other cultural features (or folkways),
such as style of architecture, family structure, worship, and so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed

> So is it your opinion that the change in these cities was a completely independent local innovation, having nothing to do with the more or less contemporary change in England?

No, my "opinion," if you want to call it that, is that it was not a
"remnant" of anything. Or do I need to explain the (non-technical)
word "remnant" to you?

How is putative _subsequent_ influence a "remnant"?

And why would r-lessness have spread throughout the South if it
was a reflection of subsequent contact in the port of Charleston,
which wasn't the source of migration throughout the land as far
as Texas and Florida (which wasn't even American until 1818)?

[Peter Moylan]

On 24/04/14 14:03, Robert Bannister wrote:
>
> I'm also not certain about the whole of Australia, but I would say it
> was the "dance" vowel which varies widely from place to place. Here it
> seems to be somewhere between [E:] and [&:] - neither of the IPA sound
> files seem to be the right vowel. I'm pretty sure most of you use a
> shorter vowel over East.

South Australians say [dA:ns]. Victorians and NSWans say [d&:ns]. I'm
not sure about the other states.

A trickier case is "castle", especially for me because I live in
Newcastle but wasn't born here. I'm often accused of giving "Newcastle"
a Victorian pronunciation. The natives say ['nju,kA:sl]. Victorians say
['nju,k&sl]. I seem to be saying ['nju,kasl]. Apparently the Newcastle
hear my [a] as [&], even though those two vowels sound very different to me.

One thing we seem to agree on is that there is no [w] after the [u]. I
have the impression that the English town with the same name starts with
[njuw]. AusE is characterised by an extreme reluctance to move the lips,
probably because of our fly problem.

(I don't notice many flies these days, by the way. Perhaps they've
succumbed to global warming. This last year we've had the temperatures
that were predicted for 2030.]

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Thursday, April 24, 2014 7:59:29 AM UTC-4, Peter Moylan wrote:

> I have several times argued in this group that vowel length is phonemic
> in AusE, with the obvious example being the difference between "can"
> (the verb) and "can" (the container).
> Just recently I noticed an AUE regular, an AmE speaker as I recall it,
> saying that he too has a pronunciation difference between "can" and
> "can". (Sorry, I've forgotten who it was.) So perhaps there are at least
> some dialects of AmE where length matters.

Not surprising, since you can only have seen it second-hand -- unless
you've stopped "killfiling."

No, the difference between the CAN (able) and CAN (tin) vowels is
not length, it is quality. In BAD = (tin) and BAT (able), length
is _also_ involved, but that's irrelevant because it's conditioned
by the following consonant; a vowel is longer before a voiced
consonant.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Thursday, April 24, 2014 12:55:16 AM UTC-4, Jerry Friedman wrote:

> What I meant was that the approach to (dia)phonemes is similar. Both
> try to represent phonemes with IPA symbols that represent the sounds
> rather than economizing on symbols. For instance, I believe the OED
> uses the equivalents of /a/ for TRAP and /A:/ for CALM, though they
> could use /a/ and /a:/ or /a/ and /A/. There are differences in detail,
> though. The ASCII IPA pages recommend /&/ for TRAP.

But you said you were going to try to be careful about / / and [ ].

I think everything or almost everything you said in that entire
posting was about pronunciations, i.e. [ ].

[Guy Barry]

"Peter Moylan" wrote in message news:5358fca1$1...@dnews.tpgi.com.au...

>
>On 24/04/14 14:55, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>
>>>> /Ant/.
>>
>> My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
>> marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking
>> about.)
>
>Actually, a short vowel is often used when the following word starts
>with a vowel. So it's [A:nt d@nis] but [Ant Edn@].

I hadn't noticed that distinction in BrE, but it may well exist now that you
mention it.

>I have several times argued in this group that vowel length is phonemic
>in AusE,

Is that a phonemic distinction though? The word has the same meaning in
both contexts, so it's not a minimal pair.

>with the obvious example being the difference between "can"
>(the verb) and "can" (the container).

That's a more interesting example. I can't decide whether I consciously
differentiate them or not.

--
Guy Barry

[Guy Barry]

"Peter Moylan" wrote in message news:53590ab7$1...@dnews.tpgi.com.au...

>A trickier case is "castle", especially for me because I live in
>Newcastle but wasn't born here. I'm often accused of giving "Newcastle"
>a Victorian pronunciation. The natives say ['nju,kA:sl]. Victorians say
>['nju,k&sl]. I seem to be saying ['nju,kasl]. Apparently the Newcastle
>hear my [a] as [&], even though those two vowels sound very different to
>me.
>
>One thing we seem to agree on is that there is no [w] after the [u]. I
>have the impression that the English town with the same name starts with
>[njuw].

I'm no expert on Geordie dialect, but the native pronunciation sounds
something like [nj@'k&sl] to my ears (if we're talking about
Newcastle-upon-Tyne that is). I give it the rather more boring southern
English pronunciation of ['nju:,kA:sl].

As for Newcastle-under-Lyme (in the Midlands), I really wouldn't like to say
how the natives pronounce that, but I pronounce it ['nju:,kA:sl] as well.

--
Guy Barry

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/24/14 5:59 AM, Peter Moylan wrote:
> On 24/04/14 14:55, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>
>>>> /Ant/.
>>
>> My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
>> marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking
>> about.)
>
> Actually, a short vowel is often used when the following word starts
> with a vowel. So it's [A:nt d@nis] but [Ant Edn@].
>
> I have several times argued in this group that vowel length is phonemic
> in AusE, with the obvious example being the difference between "can"
> (the verb) and "can" (the container).
>
> Just recently I noticed an AUE regular, an AmE speaker as I recall it,
> saying that he too has a pronunciation difference between "can" and
> "can". (Sorry, I've forgotten who it was.)

Peter Daniels.

> So perhaps there are at least
> some dialects of AmE where length matters.

Wikipedia says, "There exist pairs of long and short vowels with
overlapping vowel quality giving Australian English phonemic length
distinction, which is unusual amongst the various dialects of English,
though not unknown elsewhere, such as in regional south-eastern dialects
of the UK and eastern seaboard dialects in the US.[12]"

The reference is to "Robert Mannell (14 August 2009). "Australian
English - Impressionistic Phonetic Studies". Clas.mq.edu.au. Archived
from the original on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 26 July 2011."

http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonetics/ausenglish/impressionistic.html

It doesn't mention American or British vowels that I can see. I don't
know what American dialects are supposed to have a phonemic length
distinction. I don't think New York English is normally analyzed that way.

I wonder whether anyone has tried to write quantitative verse in
Australian English.

> Clarification: the verb "can" is pronounced [k@n] when followed by an
> infinitive, in both AmE and AusE, but that's not the difference I'm
> talking about. Further, I'm not talking about the [kIn] that occurs in
> some AmE dialects. I'm referring to the difference between "Yes I [k&n]"
> and "It's in the [k&:n]".

Got it.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/24/14 7:52 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
...

>"Robert Mannell (14 August 2009). "Australian
> English - Impressionistic Phonetic Studies". Clas.mq.edu.au. Archived
> from the original on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 26 July 2011."
>
> http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonetics/ausenglish/impressionistic.html
>
>
> It doesn't mention American or British vowels that I can see.

...

Except some comparisons of vowel quality in AusE and RP.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Jerry Friedman]

Everybody has a forehead, but that didn't stop the spelling
pronunciation of "forehead" (which is the pronunciation I use, by the way).

--
Jerry Friedman

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/24/14 3:48 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 23:13:41 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 4/23/14 7:18 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Jerry Friedman
>>> <jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>>>>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>>>>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>>>>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>>>>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>>>>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>>>>
>>>> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>>>> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>>>> "aunt".
>>>
>>> Ornt?
>>
>> Haven't we been through this?
>
> Yes, we have.
>
> But all I am sure of as a result if the reiteration is that whatever the "aw"
> sound means to Americans who do or don't have it, it is completely different
> from the "aw" sound as I use it.

That seems like a good reason *not* to guess that Americans say "ornt".
...

Anyway, I think you'd find some (by no means all) New Yorkers and maybe
some Southerners have an "aw" sound similar to yours.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Oliver Cromm]

* Robert Bannister:

Exactly. Maybe you didn't follow my argument here. The only reason
I could think of why the pronunciation "awnt" should be "more
correct" is that it conforms with the spelling. Then I constructed
a /reductio ad absurdum/ argument, to refute that idea. Using that
argument is actually an indication that one doesn't know the word
in the way a native speaker knows common words.

The two pronunciations that are very common, even more so than
"awnt", are no doubt correct.

--
It gets hot in Raleigh, but Texas! I don't know why anybody
lives here, honestly.
-- A character in Robert C. Wilson, Vortex, p.220

[R H Draney]

Berkeley Brett filted:

>
>I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
>In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people
>pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
>
>The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a
>more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>

>I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking
>world.
>

>Thanks for anything you may care to share....

I have no standard pronunciation for this word...neither of my parents had any
brothers or sisters....r


--
Me? Sarcastic?
Yeah, right.

[Ross]

On Friday, April 25, 2014 12:56:56 AM UTC+12, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> On Thursday, April 24, 2014 12:00:23 AM UTC-4, Ross wrote:
>
> > On Thursday, April 24, 2014 2:55:18 PM UTC+12, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > > On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 7:54:45 PM UTC-4, Ross wrote:
>
> > > > Aha. I had been thinking of it as a remnant Briticism,
> > > > like r-lessness in NY and Boston.
>
> > > How can NY and Boston r-lessness be a "remnant Briticism," given that
> > > NY and Boston -- and Philadelphia -- were settled well before r got
> > > lost in a small part of southeastern England?
>
> > The short answer would be that it could very well have spread to those areas well after their initial settlement. I remember being taught long ago that the fact that the change was confined to these cities (also Charleston, I believe) and their immediate hinterlands, and had never spread very far inland, was to be explained by their being major seaports and thus open to influence from overseas.
>
> > When r-dropping came up here (or on sci.lang) a while ago, I was unable to find anything very definite about the chronology of the change in America.
>
> As the historian (not even a linguist!) David Hackett Fischer shows in
> *Albion's Seed*, the four main dialect divisions in the US derive from
> the fact that the first four major settlements on the land were from
> different parts of England -- and the dialect distinctions are matched
> by distinction in a couple dozen other cultural features (or folkways),
> such as style of architecture, family structure, worship, and so on.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed

I'm sure that's an interesting book, but what does it tell us about r-dropping?

> > So is it your opinion that the change in these cities was a completely independent local innovation, having nothing to do with the more or less contemporary change in England?

> No, my "opinion," if you want to call it that, is that it was not a
> "remnant" of anything. Or do I need to explain the (non-technical)
> word "remnant" to you?

No thanks.

> How is putative _subsequent_ influence a "remnant"?

I meant to express the fact that r-lessness is marginal, and, I believe, recessive, within the broad picture of present day American English; and that it was a very late (perhaps the last) sound change to spread from Britain to America. If you can suggest a better word, fine.

> And why would r-lessness have spread throughout the South if it
> was a reflection of subsequent contact in the port of Charleston,
> which wasn't the source of migration throughout the land as far
> as Texas and Florida (which wasn't even American until 1818)?

That's a good question. So are you going to claim an independent local origin for this?

[Robert Bannister]

On 24/04/2014 10:55 am, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 7:54:45 PM UTC-4, Ross wrote:
>
>> Aha. I had been thinking of it as a remnant Briticism,
>> like r-lessness in NY and Boston.
>
> How can NY and Boston r-lessness be a "remnant Briticism," given that
> NY and Boston -- and Philadelphia -- were settled well before r got
> lost in a small part of southeastern England?
>

It could be because emigrants often do retain aspects of language that
have long been lost since their departure. Not saying that this is the
case, but it is possible - even likely.

[Robert Bannister]

On 25/04/2014 9:32 am, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 24/04/2014 10:55 am, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 7:54:45 PM UTC-4, Ross wrote:
>>
>>> Aha. I had been thinking of it as a remnant Briticism,
>>> like r-lessness in NY and Boston.
>>
>> How can NY and Boston r-lessness be a "remnant Briticism," given that
>> NY and Boston -- and Philadelphia -- were settled well before r got
>> lost in a small part of southeastern England?
>>
>

Please ignore my comments below. While not untrue, they ignore the facts
of the case presented above.

> It could be because emigrants often do retain aspects of language that
> have long been lost since their departure. Not saying that this is the
> case, but it is possible - even likely.
>

As others have said, being on the east coast and having more frequent
contact with England than other parts could have played a role.

[Robert Bannister]

On 24/04/2014 12:55 pm, Jerry Friedman wrote:

> My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
> marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking
> about.)

So, if my understanding of the use of brackets is correct, my local
Australian pronunciation of "aunt" is /A:nt/ or [&:nt]. Is that right?
It uses our long "ah" phoneme, but we don't actually use "ah" for that.
Whether it should be [&] or [a] or [E], I'm not sure.

[Robert Bannister]

I've added my contribution, but now I'm left wondering whether I say it
that way all the time.

[Robert Bannister]

I thought they were two separate words, "forrid" and "fore head". Took
me a long time to connect them. My feeling then and now is that
"forehead" is not seen a great deal in print apart from with regard to
the girl with the curl. "Aunt" or "Auntie", on the other hand, is seen
reasonably frequently in children's books.

Just a feeling. I'm not claiming this is so.

[Robert Bannister]

It's the magic dung beetles they've been spreading around for years. I
really noticed the difference in Canberra this year - the only
Australian city that had a bush fly problem for ages - no Australian
salute necessary. Wonderful.

[Robert Bannister]

On 24/04/2014 1:37 pm, Guy Barry wrote:
> "Berkeley Brett" wrote in message
> news:a5ac3157-8cc2-4420...@googlegroups.com...

>>
>> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>>
>> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most
>> people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used)
>> as "antie".
>>
>> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt"
>> (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American
>> community.
>>

>> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the
>> English-speaking world.
>

> This is the type of question where respelling is next to useless,
> because respellings that work in one person's dialect are highly likely
> to be misunderstood in another person's. I've read briefly though the
> thread and seen people saying things like "I pronounce it like
> 'aren't'". "Aunt" and "aren't" are indeed homophones for me, but I know
> that it's useless my saying so since many readers here pronounce the "r"
> in "aren't". Similarly there's no point in my saying "I rhyme 'aunt'
> with 'can't'", because I don't know how other readers will say "can't".
>
> I pronounce it roughly like this (standard RP):
>
> http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/aunt
>
> The ASCII IPA transcription is /A:nt/, with the same vowel as in
> "father". In the local dialect round here though (west of England), it's
> more like /&nt/ or even /&:nt/ (roughly homophonous with "ant").
>
> I don't know what you mean by the spelling "awnt". If you mean /O:nt/
> (which would rhyme with "taunt" in my dialect), I've never heard
> anything like that, even though it would reflect the usual pronunciation
> of the digraph "au". But I don't know whether you have the cot-caught
> merger or not, or even whether it's relevant here.
>
I have to say that that is pretty close to the way I say it, except she
has - can't think of the word - more "onset"? attack?

[Robert Bannister]

Go back to square one and throw double six to start again.

[Tony Cooper]

I'm not surprised. My wife says "ahnt" and I say "ant". She's from
the Midwest, I'm from the Midwest. We are from very similar
social/economic backgrounds. I have no idea why either of us adopted
the pronunciation we have. I don't really think about it, either.

Both of our children use "ant". That may tell you something, but I'm
not sure what it is.
--
Tony Cooper - Orlando FL

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/24/14 8:42 PM, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 24/04/2014 12:55 pm, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>
>> My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
>> marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking
>> about.)
>
> So, if my understanding of the use of brackets is correct, my local
> Australian pronunciation of "aunt" is /A:nt/ or [&:nt]. Is that right?

Pending a more authoritative answer, I'd say it's not wrong. The way
Markus Laker explains it, the things between slashes are diaphonemes,
and you've extended one from BrE to AusE as recommended. In other
words, you're saying that "aunt" is in the CALM lexical set for you.
Brackets are the right notation for the way you actually say it.

> It uses our long "ah" phoneme, but we don't actually use "ah" for that.
> Whether it should be [&] or [a] or [E], I'm not sure.

I listened to rhban's pronunciation at forvo, and I'm not sure either.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Peter T. Daniels]

But THERE WAS NO R-LESSNESS in England at the time the Pilgrims,
Puritans, and other colonists and settlers came to the future US.

[Peter Moylan]

On 25/04/14 00:48, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>
> Everybody has a forehead, but that didn't stop the spelling
> pronunciation of "forehead" (which is the pronunciation I use, by the way).

There was a little girl
And she had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good
She was very very good
And when she was bad she was whore-head.

[Peter Moylan]

On 25/04/14 12:42, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 24/04/2014 12:55 pm, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>
>> My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
>> marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking
>> about.)
>
> So, if my understanding of the use of brackets is correct, my local
> Australian pronunciation of "aunt" is /A:nt/ or [&:nt]. Is that right?
> It uses our long "ah" phoneme, but we don't actually use "ah" for that.
> Whether it should be [&] or [a] or [E], I'm not sure.

You are almost certainly saying /A:nt/. In AusE, /&:nt/ is the little
black thing that gets into the sugar bowl.

[Steve Hayes]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2014 22:03:32 +1000, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org.invalid>
wrote:

>On 24/04/14 19:48, Steve Hayes wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 23:13:41 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 4/23/14 7:18 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Jerry Friedman
>>>> <jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>>>>>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>>>>>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>>>>>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>>>>>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>>>>>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>>>>>
>>>>> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>>>>> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>>>>> "aunt".
>>>>
>>>> Ornt?
>>>
>>> Haven't we been through this?
>>
>> Yes, we have.
>>
>> But all I am sure of as a result if the reiteration is that whatever the "aw"
>> sound means to Americans who do or don't have it, it is completely different
>> from the "aw" sound as I use it.
>

>That's an interesting point. We sometimes accuse Americans of have a
>shortage of vowels, and that's probably true of west-coast Americans. On
>the other hand, it appears that some Americans have three different "aw"
>vowels, and I'm not sure that I could pick the difference.

The American "aw" in "law" sounds like "ah" to me.

http://www.forvo.com/word/law/#en

and my pronunciation resembles the second (UK) pronunciation by topquark.

But the American "aw" in "lawyer" sounds quite similar to mine.

http://www.forvo.com/word/lawyer/#en


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Steve Hayes]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2014 09:31:49 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>

wrote:

>On 4/24/14 3:48 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 23:13:41 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 4/23/14 7:18 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Jerry Friedman
>>>> <jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 4:00:54 PM UTC-6, Ross wrote:
>>>>>> I sense a potential confusion developing here. People in some countries
>>>>>> reading your "ant", "ahnt" and "awnt" might think you were talking about
>>>>>> three different pronunciations of the word. But I suspect that you (like me)
>>>>>> have the same vowel in "father" (ah) and "fawn" (aw) so that "ahnt" and
>>>>>> "awnt" are just different ways of representing the same thing. Am I right?
>>>>>
>>>>> You may be right about bill, but in my experience Americans who
>>>>> distinguish between the vowels in "fawn" and "father" use "fawn" in
>>>>> "aunt".
>>>>
>>>> Ornt?
>>>
>>> Haven't we been through this?
>>
>> Yes, we have.
>>
>> But all I am sure of as a result if the reiteration is that whatever the "aw"
>> sound means to Americans who do or don't have it, it is completely different
>> from the "aw" sound as I use it.
>
>That seems like a good reason *not* to guess that Americans say "ornt".

I wasn't guessing that Americans say "ornt".

I was indicating that that is what "awnt" looked as it it sounded like TO ME.

>...
>
>Anyway, I think you'd find some (by no means all) New Yorkers and maybe
>some Southerners have an "aw" sound similar to yours.

--

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, April 25, 2014 3:25:12 AM UTC-4, Steve Hayes wrote:

> The American "aw" in "law" sounds like "ah" to me.

Some Americans say "lah" and some (the ones who don't merge "cot"
and "caught") say "law."

[Peter Percival]

Berkeley Brett wrote:
> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>
> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
>
> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>
> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking world.

I pronounce it the same as I pronounce "aren't". I am from the English
Midlands.

> Thanks for anything you may care to share....
>

--
...if someone seduced my daughter it would be damaging and horrifying
but not fatal. She would recover, marry and have lots of children...
On the other hand, if some elderly, or not so elderly, schoolmaster
seduced one of my sons and taught him to be a homosexual, he would ruin
him for life. That is the fundamental distinction. -- Lord Longford

[Guy Barry]

"Peter Percival" wrote in message news:ljdsdn$gh6$1...@news.albasani.net...

>
>Berkeley Brett wrote:
>> I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>>
>> In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most
>> people pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as
>> "antie".
>>
>> The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which
>> seems a more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>>
>> I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the
>> English-speaking world.
>
>I pronounce it the same as I pronounce "aren't". I am from the English
>Midlands.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Granny. Knock knock.
Who's there?
Granny. Knock knock.
Who's there?
Granny. Knock knock.
Who's there?
Aunt.
Aunt who?
Aunt you glad I didn't say "Granny"?

(That'll leave all the AmE speakers scratching their heads in
incomprehension.)

--
Guy Barry

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/25/14 1:25 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2014 22:03:32 +1000, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org.invalid>
> wrote:
>> On 24/04/14 19:48, Steve Hayes wrote:

...

>>> But all I am sure of as a result if the reiteration is that whatever the "aw"
>>> sound means to Americans who do or don't have it, it is completely different
>>> from the "aw" sound as I use it.
>>
>> That's an interesting point. We sometimes accuse Americans of have a
>> shortage of vowels, and that's probably true of west-coast Americans. On
>> the other hand, it appears that some Americans have three different "aw"
>> vowels, and I'm not sure that I could pick the difference.
>
> The American "aw" in "law" sounds like "ah" to me.
>
> http://www.forvo.com/word/law/#en

"Law" singular? Two of those American pronunciations are pretty
similar, and I'm not surprised they sound like "ah" to you, but I'd have
thought southernaccent's was noticeably different even to someone who's
not used to American accents.

It's too bad forvo doesn't have a New Yorker with a "Brooklynese" accent
saying "law". Here's "talk".

http://www.forvo.com/word/talk/#en

I'd say kurtss is from the New York area, and I'm sure bjhinton and
alanada are. Those may convince you that there's no single American "aw".

> and my pronunciation resembles the second (UK) pronunciation by topquark.
>
> But the American "aw" in "lawyer" sounds quite similar to mine.
>
> http://www.forvo.com/word/lawyer/#en

Some CIC Americans say "lawyer" with the "ah" vowel, so it's just like
"liar". This sounds very strange to me (except as a joke).

I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o"
of "boy". If I say "the law you're talking about", my "you're" probably
sounds like "yer", but "law you're" doesn't sound like "lawyer". My
English has a spelling-to-pronunciation rule that "aw", when not
followed by a vowel, always represents the THOUGHT vowel, with only two
exceptions: "lawyer" and "sawyer". I suspect a lot of Americans away
from the East Coast could say the same.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Guy Barry]

"Jerry Friedman" wrote in message news:ljduj2$l6m$1...@news.albasani.net...

>
>I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o" of
>"boy".

I do as well, but the ASCII IPA transcription of that diphthong is /OI/,
which starts with the same vowel sound as I (and I imagine you) use in
"law". I would transcribe "law" as /lO:/ and "lawyer" as /lOI@/, yet I
don't imagine the latter as containing an element of the "law" vowel. Is
the transcription inadequate?

>If I say "the law you're talking about", my "you're" probably sounds like
>"yer", but "law you're" doesn't sound like "lawyer". My English has a
>spelling-to-pronunciation rule that "aw", when not followed by a vowel,
>always represents the THOUGHT vowel, with only two exceptions: "lawyer" and
>"sawyer". I suspect a lot of Americans away from the East Coast could say
>the same.

There are probably one or two other exceptions, e.g. "awry" /@'raI/, but in
general I would agree with your rule.

--
Guy Barry

[Jerry Friedman]

I see. I was talking about American pronunciations (and saying
something that wasn't all that true), so with only one word to go by, I
thought you were talking about the same thing.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Tony Cooper]

Oh, dear. Do you think that Americans are in no way exposed to the
pronunciation by some British people of some words? Especially in
this group?

Even more head-scratching would be suspected on your part if you had
set up the joke to be Scottish/Irish:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amn%27t and press the sound
icon.

[Guy Barry]

"Tony Cooper" wrote in message
news:u73ll9h2u167dekio...@4ax.com...

>
>On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 15:52:52 +0100, "Guy Barry"
><guy....@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

[...]

>>Aunt you glad I didn't say "Granny"?

>Even more head-scratching would be suspected on your part if you had
>set up the joke to be Scottish/Irish:
>
>http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amn%27t and press the sound
>icon.

It wouldn't have worked with "amn't".

--
Guy Barry

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, April 25, 2014 11:48:57 AM UTC-4, Guy Barry wrote:
> "Jerry Friedman" wrote in message news:ljduj2$l6m$1...@news.albasani.net...

> >I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o" of
> >"boy".

For me, the "boy" diphthong starts with the vowel in both "law" and
"lawyer."

> I do as well, but the ASCII IPA transcription of that diphthong is /OI/,
> which starts with the same vowel sound as I (and I imagine you) use in
> "law". I would transcribe "law" as /lO:/ and "lawyer" as /lOI@/, yet I
> don't imagine the latter as containing an element of the "law" vowel. Is
> the transcription inadequate?

You're saying that you have the same phoneme in "law" and "lawyer." Probably
everyone would agree about that. But you didn't indicate anything about
whether the phoneme is pronounced differently in the two words.

> >If I say "the law you're talking about", my "you're" probably sounds like
> >"yer", but "law you're" doesn't sound like "lawyer". My English has a
> >spelling-to-pronunciation rule that "aw", when not followed by a vowel,
> >always represents the THOUGHT vowel, with only two exceptions: "lawyer" and
> >"sawyer". I suspect a lot of Americans away from the East Coast could say
> >the same.

Note that he didn't say which Wells vowel is found in "lawyer" and "sawyer."

[Guy Barry]

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message
news:a58731d7-7d8c-476f...@googlegroups.com...

>
>On Friday, April 25, 2014 11:48:57 AM UTC-4, Guy Barry wrote:

>> I would transcribe "law" as /lO:/ and "lawyer" as /lOI@/, yet I
>> don't imagine the latter as containing an element of the "law" vowel. Is
>> the transcription inadequate?
>
>You're saying that you have the same phoneme in "law" and "lawyer."

No, I'm not. I have different phonemes in "law" and "lawyer": /O:/ and
/OI/ respectively. One's a pure vowel, the other's a diphthong.

[Jerry Friedman:]

>> >If I say "the law you're talking about", my "you're" probably sounds
>> >like
>> >"yer", but "law you're" doesn't sound like "lawyer". My English has a
>> >spelling-to-pronunciation rule that "aw", when not followed by a vowel,
>> >always represents the THOUGHT vowel, with only two exceptions: "lawyer"
>> >and
>> >"sawyer". I suspect a lot of Americans away from the East Coast could
>> >say
>> >the same.
>
>Note that he didn't say which Wells vowel is found in "lawyer" and
>"sawyer."

I have the CHOICE vowel, not the THOUGHT vowel. I presume that Jerry has
the same vowel, though I don't know.

--
Guy Barry

[Oliver Cromm]

* R H Draney:

> Berkeley Brett filted:

>>
>>I hope you are all well & in good spirits.
>>
>>In the areas in which I've lived (Michigan and California, USA), most people
>>pronounce "aunt" as "ant", and "auntie" (not frequently used) as "antie".
>>
>>The one community that consistently pronounces the word as "awnt" (which seems a
>>more "correct" pronunciation) is the African-American community.
>>
>>I wonder how the word "aunt" is pronounced in your part of the English-speaking
>>world.
>>

>>Thanks for anything you may care to share....
>

> I have no standard pronunciation for this word...neither of my parents had any
> brothers or sisters....r

I heard that due to the long-standing one-child policy in China,
young people don't learn many of the traditional names for
relatives any more, like "second son of an elder sister of your
father" and the other 127 translations of "cousin".

--
Spell checker (n.) One who gives examinations on witchcraft.
Herman Rubin in sci.lang

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, April 25, 2014 1:12:37 PM UTC-4, Guy Barry wrote:
> "Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message
> news:a58731d7-7d8c-476f...@googlegroups.com...
> >On Friday, April 25, 2014 11:48:57 AM UTC-4, Guy Barry wrote:

> >> I would transcribe "law" as /lO:/ and "lawyer" as /lOI@/, yet I
> >> don't imagine the latter as containing an element of the "law" vowel. Is
> >> the transcription inadequate?
> >You're saying that you have the same phoneme in "law" and "lawyer."
>
> No, I'm not. I have different phonemes in "law" and "lawyer": /O:/ and
> /OI/ respectively. One's a pure vowel, the other's a diphthong.

It's enormously unlikey that you can get from [O(I)] to [@] without
a glide, so I put it to you that your "lawyer" is [lO(:)j@].

So I was saying that your transcription was inadequate because you
presented it as a phonemicization rathr than as what you actually say.

> [Jerry Friedman:]
> >> >If I say "the law you're talking about", my "you're" probably sounds
> >> >like
> >> >"yer", but "law you're" doesn't sound like "lawyer". My English has a
> >> >spelling-to-pronunciation rule that "aw", when not followed by a vowel,
> >> >always represents the THOUGHT vowel, with only two exceptions: "lawyer"
> >> >and
> >> >"sawyer". I suspect a lot of Americans away from the East Coast could
> >> >say
> >> >the same.
> >Note that he didn't say which Wells vowel is found in "lawyer" and
> >"sawyer."
>
> I have the CHOICE vowel, not the THOUGHT vowel. I presume that Jerry has
> the same vowel, though I don't know.

Does Wells claim that the first part of CHOICE is not THOUGHT?

[Robert Bannister]

On 25/04/2014 1:30 pm, Peter Moylan wrote:
> On 25/04/14 12:42, Robert Bannister wrote:
>> On 24/04/2014 12:55 pm, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>
>>> My mistake. It's /A:nt/. (I'm used to rebelliously leaving out length
>>> marks for American English, but that's not the dialect we're talking
>>> about.)
>>
>> So, if my understanding of the use of brackets is correct, my local
>> Australian pronunciation of "aunt" is /A:nt/ or [&:nt]. Is that right?
>> It uses our long "ah" phoneme, but we don't actually use "ah" for that.
>> Whether it should be [&] or [a] or [E], I'm not sure.
>
> You are almost certainly saying /A:nt/. In AusE, /&:nt/ is the little

> black thing that gets into the sugar bowl...
>
...and everywhere else. I thought with the change in weather to almost
normal Autumnal temperatures that the ants had disappeared, but I found
one in my bathroom yesterday. Cleaning its teeth, no doubt, although I
don't keep sugar in the house.

[R H Draney]

Jerry Friedman filted:

>
>Some CIC Americans say "lawyer" with the "ah" vowel, so it's just like
>"liar". This sounds very strange to me (except as a joke).
>
>I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o"
>of "boy".

AOL...my "lawyer" rhymes with "foyer"....r


--
Me? Sarcastic?
Yeah, right.

[Jerry Friedman]

Oh. That too. I probably have to say that the "a" and the "w" are in
the same syllable as defined by dictionary syllabifications.

> but in general I would agree with your rule.

--

Jerry Friedman

[Jerry Friedman]

Much easier than one that baffled me as a child, which ended, "Orange
you glad I didn't say banana?"

--
Jerry Friedman

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/25/14 7:33 PM, R H Draney wrote:
> Jerry Friedman filted:
>>
>> Some CIC Americans say "lawyer" with the "ah" vowel, so it's just like
>> "liar". This sounds very strange to me (except as a joke).
>>
>> I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o"
>> of "boy".
>
> AOL...my "lawyer" rhymes with "foyer"....r

But the question, which I didn't state very well, is whether the first
element of the diphthong in "lawyer" and "foyer" is the "law" vowel or
something else.

Phonetically, I feel sure there are consistent articulatory and
acoustic differences between those two sounds for me.

Phonemically, I think I get my choice whether I call it /O/ or /oU/,
THOUGHT or GOAT, though I might have reasons to prefer one or the other.

In my belief, it's a "long o", because that's what my teachers told me
in phonics.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Steve Hayes]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 09:21:27 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>On 4/25/14 1:25 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>> On Thu, 24 Apr 2014 22:03:32 +1000, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org.invalid>
>> wrote:
>>> On 24/04/14 19:48, Steve Hayes wrote:
>...
>
>>>> But all I am sure of as a result if the reiteration is that whatever the "aw"
>>>> sound means to Americans who do or don't have it, it is completely different
>>>> from the "aw" sound as I use it.
>>>
>>> That's an interesting point. We sometimes accuse Americans of have a
>>> shortage of vowels, and that's probably true of west-coast Americans. On
>>> the other hand, it appears that some Americans have three different "aw"
>>> vowels, and I'm not sure that I could pick the difference.
>>
>> The American "aw" in "law" sounds like "ah" to me.
>>
>> http://www.forvo.com/word/law/#en
>
>"Law" singular? Two of those American pronunciations are pretty
>similar, and I'm not surprised they sound like "ah" to you, but I'd have
>thought southernaccent's was noticeably different even to someone who's
>not used to American accents.
>
>It's too bad forvo doesn't have a New Yorker with a "Brooklynese" accent
>saying "law". Here's "talk".
>
>http://www.forvo.com/word/talk/#en
>
>I'd say kurtss is from the New York area, and I'm sure bjhinton and
>alanada are. Those may convince you that there's no single American "aw".

I assume ynarakit has the "caught/cot" merger, since what she says sounds like
"tok" to me.

>> and my pronunciation resembles the second (UK) pronunciation by topquark.
>>
>> But the American "aw" in "lawyer" sounds quite similar to mine.
>>
>> http://www.forvo.com/word/lawyer/#en
>
>Some CIC Americans say "lawyer" with the "ah" vowel, so it's just like
>"liar". This sounds very strange to me (except as a joke).
>
>I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o"
>of "boy". If I say "the law you're talking about", my "you're" probably
>sounds like "yer", but "law you're" doesn't sound like "lawyer". My
>English has a spelling-to-pronunciation rule that "aw", when not
>followed by a vowel, always represents the THOUGHT vowel, with only two
>exceptions: "lawyer" and "sawyer". I suspect a lot of Americans away
>from the East Coast could say the same.

There seems to be quite a lot of variety here

http://www.forvo.com/word/thought/#en

but my pronunciation of "thought" resembles that of TopQuark.

[Steve Hayes]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 10:15:21 -0600, Jerry Friedman <jerry_f...@yahoo.com>

I was just pointing out that indicating someone's pronunciation of "aunt" as
"awnt" is pretty meaningless, since there are so many different pronunciations
of "aw", and mine rhymes with "ornt", or to be more precise, with the
"thought" vowel used by TopQuark here:

http://www.forvo.com/word/thought/#en

[Mack A. Damia]

How do you pronounce "bath"?

I pronounce is as it rhymes with "math", but the English upper-class
pronunciation ( at least when I was a boy) was "baaahth" (almost
"bohth").

My sister has a house-mate from Pittsburgh, and they have a very
unique accent. It is rather "broad" sounding ("downtown" is
"dahntahn", "pound" is "pand") but she has picked up the habit of
pronouncing bath like the upper-class English do, and it sounds
ridiculous.

--

[Steve Hayes]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 22:27:51 -0700, Mack A. Damia <mybaco...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>How do you pronounce "bath"?
>
>I pronounce is as it rhymes with "math", but the English upper-class
>pronunciation ( at least when I was a boy) was "baaahth" (almost
>"bohth").
>
>My sister has a house-mate from Pittsburgh, and they have a very
>unique accent. It is rather "broad" sounding ("downtown" is
>"dahntahn", "pound" is "pand") but she has picked up the habit of
>pronouncing bath like the upper-class English do, and it sounds
>ridiculous.

"Bath" is, I think, one of those words that marks where you come from the
moment you say it.

I think SAfE has a fairly distinctive pronunciation, which may sound like
"borth" to BrE speakers. Northern and southern English pronunciations are
different and distinctive. I'm not sure how many US pronunciations there are,
but I think I'm familiar with the one you are referring to:

the guy who taught us math
and never took a bath
acquired a certain measure of, uh, renown
and after school he sold the most amazing pictures
in my home town.

[Guy Barry]

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message

news:8e15a42e-55fe-4a98...@googlegroups.com...

>
>On Friday, April 25, 2014 1:12:37 PM UTC-4, Guy Barry wrote:
>> "Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message
>> news:a58731d7-7d8c-476f...@googlegroups.com...
>> >On Friday, April 25, 2014 11:48:57 AM UTC-4, Guy Barry wrote:
>
>> >> I would transcribe "law" as /lO:/ and "lawyer" as /lOI@/, yet I
>> >> don't imagine the latter as containing an element of the "law" vowel.
>> >> Is
>> >> the transcription inadequate?
>> >You're saying that you have the same phoneme in "law" and "lawyer."
>>
>> No, I'm not. I have different phonemes in "law" and "lawyer": /O:/ and
>> /OI/ respectively. One's a pure vowel, the other's a diphthong.
>
>It's enormously unlikey that you can get from [O(I)] to [@] without
>a glide, so I put it to you that your "lawyer" is [lO(:)j@].

No, my "lawyer" is not ['lO:j@]. When I first saw it written down as a
child I thought it was pronounced like that, because of the spelling, but
then I heard my grandfather saying ['lOI@] and realized the pronunciation
was anomalous. I would differentiate between "it's the law you're talking
about" [Its D@ lO: j@ 'tO:kiN @'baUt] and "it's the lawyer talking about..."
[Its D@ 'lOI@ 'tO:kiN @'baUt].

My dictionary actually gives both pronunciations, with ['lO:j@] first and
['lOI@] second. Macmillan only has the first, which makes me wonder if
['lOI@] is a little old-fashioned now.

>So I was saying that your transcription was inadequate because you
>presented it as a phonemicization rathr than as what you actually say.

I've written it in square brackets this time, if that helps.

>> I have the CHOICE vowel, not the THOUGHT vowel. I presume that Jerry has
>> the same vowel, though I don't know.
>
>Does Wells claim that the first part of CHOICE is not THOUGHT?

I thought that the Wells sets were independent of their realization in any
particular dialect; they're just labels for sets of words that have the same
diaphoneme (if that's the correct term). The first part of the CHOICE vowel
may well be the THOUGHT vowel in some dialects, but not mine, even though I
conventionally write the former as [OI] and the latter as [O:]. Thinking
about it more, though, I'd say my CHOICE vowel is actually closer to [A.I],
though I've never seen it notated that way.

--
Guy Barry

[Ross]

On Saturday, April 26, 2014 9:11:41 PM UTC+12, Steve Hayes wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 22:27:51 -0700, Mack A. Damia <mybaco...@hotmail.com>
>
> wrote:
>
> >How do you pronounce "bath"?
>
> >I pronounce is as it rhymes with "math", but the English upper-class
> >pronunciation ( at least when I was a boy) was "baaahth" (almost
> >"bohth").
>
> >My sister has a house-mate from Pittsburgh, and they have a very
> >unique accent. It is rather "broad" sounding ("downtown" is
> >"dahntahn", "pound" is "pand") but she has picked up the habit of
> >pronouncing bath like the upper-class English do, and it sounds
> >ridiculous.
>
> "Bath" is, I think, one of those words that marks where you come from the
> moment you say it.
>
> I think SAfE has a fairly distinctive pronunciation, which may sound like
> "borth" to BrE speakers. Northern and southern English pronunciations are
> different and distinctive. I'm not sure how many US pronunciations there are,
> but I think I'm familiar with the one you are referring to:
>
> the guy who taught us math
> and never took a bath
> acquired a certain measure of, uh, renown
> and after school he sold the most amazing pictures
> in my home town.

Phonemically (if you'll pardon the expression) it's the same
difference as with "aunt" -- BATH vs TRAP, in Wells's terms.
But phonetically, the SAfEng BATH vowel (not just in bath, but
dance, can't, grass, etc.) is distinctly "darker" (further back).
It's the feature by which I most often identify South Africans in
New Zealand.

[Guy Barry]

"R H Draney" wrote in message news:ljf2c...@drn.newsguy.com...

>
>Jerry Friedman filted:
>>
>>Some CIC Americans say "lawyer" with the "ah" vowel, so it's just like
>>"liar". This sounds very strange to me (except as a joke).
>>
>>I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o"
>>of "boy".
>
>AOL...my "lawyer" rhymes with "foyer"....r

That's not much help to me, since I pronounce "foyer" as /'fOIeI/ (FOY-ay),
and I find it hard to believe that anyone says LOY-ay for "lawyer". I say
/'lOI@/ (LOY-er), to rhyme with "employer".

--
Guy Barry

[Guy Barry]

"Jerry Friedman" wrote in message news:ljf81t$je7$1...@news.albasani.net...

>
>On 4/25/14 7:33 PM, R H Draney wrote:
>> Jerry Friedman filted:
>>>
>>> Some CIC Americans say "lawyer" with the "ah" vowel, so it's just like
>>> "liar". This sounds very strange to me (except as a joke).
>>>
>>> I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o"
>>> of "boy".
>>
>> AOL...my "lawyer" rhymes with "foyer"....r
>
>But the question, which I didn't state very well, is whether the first
>element of the diphthong in "lawyer" and "foyer" is the "law" vowel or
>something else.
>
>Phonetically, I feel sure there are consistent articulatory and
>acoustic differences between those two sounds for me.

And for me as well, though I don't suppose we're talking about the same
sounds in each case. I think my CHOICE vowel (which I use in "lawyer") is
something close to [A.I], but since AmE doesn't normally have [A.] I imagine
you must use a different diphthong.

>Phonemically, I think I get my choice whether I call it /O/ or /oU/,
>THOUGHT or GOAT, though I might have reasons to prefer one or the other.
>
>In my belief, it's a "long o", because that's what my teachers told me
>in phonics.

Oh, so it's not your CHOICE vowel at all then? The GOAT vowel in "lawyer"
would sound very odd to me; it's either the THOUGHT vowel or the CHOICE
vowel. This may be a word that can't easily be fitted into any of the
lexical sets.

--
Guy Barry

[Guy Barry]

"Steve Hayes" wrote in message
news:hmtml9l4juekpnh9c...@4ax.com...

>"Bath" is, I think, one of those words that marks where you come from the
>moment you say it.

I live in Bath, and not everyone here pronounces it the same way. The local
pronunciation is more like /b&:T/, but so many outsiders have settled here
that the RP pronunciation of /bA:T/ is probably the commoner one.

--
Guy Barry

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Saturday, April 26, 2014 5:36:27 AM UTC-4, Guy Barry wrote:

> I thought that the Wells sets were independent of their realization in any
> particular dialect; they're just labels for sets of words that have the same
> diaphoneme (if that's the correct term). The first part of the CHOICE vowel
> may well be the THOUGHT vowel in some dialects, but not mine, even though I
> conventionally write the former as [OI] and the latter as [O:]. Thinking
> about it more, though, I'd say my CHOICE vowel is actually closer to [A.I],
> though I've never seen it notated that way.

You might be approaching those for whom "lawyer" and "liar" are homophones
-- that is, cot/caught mergerers.

[Jerry Friedman]

No, "lawyer" is in the the CHOICE set for me. The question is what the
first element of that diphthong is. Phonemically, I think I could make
a case for either the THOUGHT vowel or the GOAT vowel, if there's any
reason for phonemes at all. Phonetically, my "lawyer" might be
['loIj@r] and my "choice" might be [tSois], maybe.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Jerry Friedman]

No, I was saying that in my experience *their* vowel in "aunt" is the
same as *their* vowel in "fawn", and different from *their* vowel in
"father". This is not a meaningless statement, and your pronunciation
is not involved.

I admit I didn't say "their", but I thought it was clear in context.

> and mine rhymes with "ornt", or to be more precise, with the
> "thought" vowel used by TopQuark here:
>
> http://www.forvo.com/word/thought/#en

Got it.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Guy Barry]

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message

news:a73dcccd-07a1-4e9e...@googlegroups.com...

No, "lawyer" and "liar" are nothing like homophones in my speech. I have
the CHOICE vowel in the first, and the PRICE vowel in the second. The two
are entirely distinct and are unlikely to be confused. The standard
notation for my PRICE vowel is [aI], which is fairly accurate (though maybe
the first element is closer to my STRUT vowel).

--
Guy Barry

[Jerry Friedman]

A "caught/cot" merger means her pronunciation of "caught" is the same as
her pronunciation of "cot". Your pronunciations and what things sound
like to you have nothing to do with it.

I'd expect her pronunciation of "omelette" to start with her "cot"
vowel. To me it sounds distinctly different from her vowel in "talk",
so I'd say she doesn't have the merger. You can hear this clearly in
her pronunciation of "hot dog". (Like many Americans, including me, she
uses her THOUGHT vowel in "dog".)

http://www.forvo.com/user/ynarakit/

>>> and my pronunciation resembles the second (UK) pronunciation by topquark.
>>>
>>> But the American "aw" in "lawyer" sounds quite similar to mine.
>>>
>>> http://www.forvo.com/word/lawyer/#en
>>
>> Some CIC Americans say "lawyer" with the "ah" vowel, so it's just like
>> "liar". This sounds very strange to me (except as a joke).
>>
>> I think of "lawyer" as having a different vowel from "law"--it's the "o"
>> of "boy". If I say "the law you're talking about", my "you're" probably
>> sounds like "yer", but "law you're" doesn't sound like "lawyer". My
>> English has a spelling-to-pronunciation rule that "aw", when not
>> followed by a vowel, always represents the THOUGHT vowel, with only two
>> exceptions: "lawyer" and "sawyer". I suspect a lot of Americans away
>>from the East Coast could say the same.
>
> There seems to be quite a lot of variety here
>
> http://www.forvo.com/word/thought/#en

Indeed.

> but my pronunciation of "thought" resembles that of TopQuark.

That almost rhymes with the way I say "goat".

I'd like to think that I pronounce "thought" the way floridagirl does,

http://www.forvo.com/word/montauk/#en

but actually I think I often use something more central and higher,
closer to a schwa, for what my opinion is worth. (I've been told that
people without training are very unreliable in describing their own
pronunciations.) I'm not going to look for an example like my
pronunciation or try to record anything right now.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Mack A. Damia]

Thanks, but this doesn't help me.

--

[Guy Barry]

"Mack A. Damia" wrote in message
news:ngnnl993s0jl97nnk...@4ax.com...

You'll have to come and live here then. The RP (i.e. standard southern
English) pronunciation is like this:

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/bath

Finding a sound file for the usual West Country pronunciation will be
somewhat trickier. I'm not sure if I did it justice in my transcription.

--
Guy Barry

[James Silverton]

I pronounce the cleaning equipment and the town the same way: [b&T].
Note, no colons, I've never got the hang of them. I think I've always
used this pronunciation but I was brought up in northern England and
highland Scotland.

--
Jim Silverton (Potomac, MD)

Extraneous "not." in Reply To.

[Mack A. Damia]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 11:11:41 +0200, Steve Hayes
<haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

>On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 22:27:51 -0700, Mack A. Damia <mybaco...@hotmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>How do you pronounce "bath"?
>>
>>I pronounce is as it rhymes with "math", but the English upper-class
>>pronunciation ( at least when I was a boy) was "baaahth" (almost
>>"bohth").
>>
>>My sister has a house-mate from Pittsburgh, and they have a very
>>unique accent. It is rather "broad" sounding ("downtown" is
>>"dahntahn", "pound" is "pand") but she has picked up the habit of
>>pronouncing bath like the upper-class English do, and it sounds
>>ridiculous.
>
>"Bath" is, I think, one of those words that marks where you come from the
>moment you say it.
>
>I think SAfE has a fairly distinctive pronunciation, which may sound like
>"borth" to BrE speakers. Northern and southern English pronunciations are
>different and distinctive. I'm not sure how many US pronunciations there are,
>but I think I'm familiar with the one you are referring to:
>
>the guy who taught us math
>and never took a bath
>acquired a certain measure of, uh, renown
>and after school he sold the most amazing pictures
>in my home town.

Seems to me that the pronunciation of words such as "bath", demand",
"pass", "glass" comes from the Norman invasion in 1066 when French
became the language of the upper class. As it melded with Anglo-
Saxon, pronunciation along French lines separated the upper from the
lower classes.

"Many Norman French suffixes were borrowed: -or vs. -er; -tion,
-ment, -ee, -able as a suffix."

http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/History_of_English.htm

--

[Mack A. Damia]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 17:34:56 +0100, "Guy Barry"

<guy....@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

>"Mack A. Damia" wrote in message
>news:ngnnl993s0jl97nnk...@4ax.com...
>>
>>On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 11:35:18 +0100, "Guy Barry"
>><guy....@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>"Steve Hayes" wrote in message
>>>news:hmtml9l4juekpnh9c...@4ax.com...
>>>
>>>>"Bath" is, I think, one of those words that marks where you come from the
>>>>moment you say it.
>>>
>>>I live in Bath, and not everyone here pronounces it the same way. The
>>>local
>>>pronunciation is more like /b&:T/, but so many outsiders have settled here
>>>that the RP pronunciation of /bA:T/ is probably the commoner one.
>>
>>Thanks, but this doesn't help me.
>
>You'll have to come and live here then. The RP (i.e. standard southern
>English) pronunciation is like this:
>
>http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/bath

I guess you misunderstood me. Your link helped. That is the way my
sister's friend pronounces it, and it sounds ridiculous with her
Pittsburgh accent.

/b&:T/ and /bA:T/ do not Google, and I am too old to learn special
notations. If you want to help the aged, you can make it easier for
some of us to understand.

--

[Guy Barry]

"Mack A. Damia" wrote in message

news:dlonl99nk2cha18oo...@4ax.com...

I can do one of two things: use ASCII IPA, which is the conventional
notation for phonetic transcriptions on this group, or point you to sound
files. As has been discussed in mind-blowingly tedious detail in many
different threads, all other attempts at describing dialectal differences in
pronunciation are doomed to failure. Here, in case you've somehow missed
it, is the ASCII IPA pronunciation key:

http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml

--
Guy Barry

[Jerry Friedman]

On 4/26/14 10:38 AM, Mack A. Damia wrote:
...

> Seems to me that the pronunciation of words such as "bath", demand",
> "pass", "glass" comes from the Norman invasion in 1066 when French
> became the language of the upper class. As it melded with Anglo-
> Saxon, pronunciation along French lines separated the upper from the
> lower classes.

...

According to one Joan Beal, that change started in the 17th century and
"was stigmatised as a Cockneyism until well into the 19th century."

http://books.google.com/books?id=mtd3a-56ysUC&pg=PA273

--
Jerry Friedman