8 a quick and dirty guide to east coast phonetics

*edit
It's come to my attention that I've made a shameful mistake in this entry. The "schwa" is actually a different vowel, and looks like an upside down "e," not an upside down "c." Special thanks to Vedant for pointing this out. Oh his blog is pretty cool, too. You should check it out.



I mentioned briefly in a previous entry that New Yorkers make a distinction between the words "cot" and "caught," whereas Californians don't. The distinction - known as the cot-caught merger, apparently - is actually more of an East Coast/Northeast thing, as one of my Linguistics professors pointed out during lecture one day. She also told us (the class being mostly Californians) a nifty little thing about telling the difference.

People can't distinguish between two similar-sounding words usually because their phonetic inventory (the particular vowels and consonants they use for making words; phonetic inventories vary individually) lacks one of the sounds that make the two words different. In this case, Californians use the same vowel for "cot" and "caught" - that vowel rhymes with "hot," "lot," etc. But for Northeasterners, "caught" actually uses a vowel that doesn't rhyme with those words. The vowel is the open-mid back rounded vowel, also known as the open "o", and written out it looks like an upside-down "c." If the above is true, then Californians simply don't have the open "o" in their phonetic inventory.

BUT as my professor told us, Cali people actually do use the open "o." The vowel in the word "all," for most Californians, is the vowel Northeasterners use. For some reason though, "caught" (and "bought," "ought," wrought," etc.) eluded the open "o" in West Coast speech. Kind of interesting, no?

So if any smart-assed New Yorker comes up to you and says, "You Californians can't tell the difference between 'cot' and 'caught,'" look at them squarely in the eye, repeat "all" over and over in your head, and then slip that vowel between the "c" and "t." You will blow them away (unfortunately, they will probably be too proud to admit to being proven wrong)!

Homework/just for fun: try saying "I brought all the cots inside because it ought to be hot all of next week."