Sound Comparisons

[Porter]

*looks Jonathon straight in the eye*

This has not affected my quality of life.

There!  That wasn't so hard.

[Tante Shvester]

In my dialect (Shvesterish) dock and dog are nowhere near close.  They barely have the same number of syllables.

I'm guessing you pronounce "dock" with the same vowel as "cot," while "dog" has the same vowel as "caught," neh?

Pretty much.  "Dock" has the same vowel sound as "cot".  But "dog" is more complicated.  It's kind of like "daw-uhg".  The same vowel sound that we use for the first syllable of "coffee"*.


*Actually, that's the native, unmodified Shvesterish version.  I've learned to tone it down and conform more to the mainstream pronunciation.  I had a Liza Doolittle Experience one summer in North Carolina.

[pooka]

I was in my final year of linguistics thinking I had a pretty unmarked accent when someone caught me saying candy.  I say it something like kiandy.  It's pretty slight, but my kids do it too, even the ones that are still mispronouncing other stuff with regularity.

[Jonathon]

Where were you raised, pooka? I thought you were from Utah, but that's more of a Northern Cities thing, I think. Of course, I've heard it from my sister-in-law, who is (most recently) from Colorado, so maybe it's spreading.

[goofy]

It certainly has mine. As a Canadian afflicted with the cot/caught merger, I don't and can't distinguish between Don/Dawn, Otto/auto, cod/cawed, lager/logger, yon/yawn, cock/caulk, and many other words which I don't know because I don't distinguish them.

My first realization I had this merger was when I recorded a Texan for a phonetics paper and was surprised to discover she had one more vowel than I did when she made fun of how I pronounced Loblaws.

[goofy]

a difference between phonetics and phonology

[Jonathon]

Great post.