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Can you tell someone's accent based on these four?
a. Don and Dawn are the same to me
b. Cot and Caught are the same.
c. Pen and Pin are different
d. Accept and Except are different
Or is this too small a sample? How much could you eliminate?
Which of these would fit?
a. Southern California
b. West Virginia
c. Washington State
d. Arizona
e. Atlanta, Georgia
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I think it could fit all except possibly Atlanta (though the pin-pen merger is on the decline in some Southern cities, so maybe even there).
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Josh, you are good. Thank-you.
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But they wouldn't have the caught-cot merger in Georgia or West Virginia, right?
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''Accept and Except are different''
This merger is not regional.
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''But they wouldn't have the caught-cot merger in Georgia or West Virginia, right?''
WV is fully merged
but Georgia is transitional
speaking of the low back merger, a nice map (but with some mistakes: WV should be included in the merger)
http://img159.imageshack.us/my.php?image=americanenglishdialectslf7.jpg
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Is "cot-caught" called the low back merger?
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yup
or Dawn Don merger
or hottie haughty merger
or Caulk Cock merger
(doll rhymes with tall, wall, call..)
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The terms "low back merger" and "cot caught merger" are not identical, but they are practically equivalent everywhere outside of New England. That is, the cot-caught merger is simply a merger of two lexical classes, whereas the low back merger is necessarily a merger of the /A:/ and /Q:/ (or /O:/) phonemes. The issue is moot in most of the country, but in Eastern New England, "cot" and "caught" have merged with [Q:], while leaving the father-bother distinction intact with a separate vowel [a:]. So the map above is mistaken in claiming that there is a "[O]/[a] merger" in Eastern New England - that's definitely false.
Or to put it another way, low back merger = father-bother merger + cot-caught merger.
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Thank-you, but can you suggest a map for the cot-caught merger? I saw one on Wiki, but it was so small, that I couldn't determine which cities were merged.
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You mean this one ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Cot-caught_merger.png )? I would say that the terminology on that one (and in Wikipedia in general) is flawed, but it provides a good picture of the situation.
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Yes. Is it that specific?
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Well yeah, if you put it next to a regular US map I think you could find dot-to-city equivalencies.
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Do you think 3 merged regions could make a continuum?
Western influence is spreading to Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus which are close to W PA. Low back merger could spread from Vermont to eastern parts of the NY state, it can go thru Albany and get to W PA (thus leaving Northern and Western Parts of the NYstate, which are NCVS infuenced alone)...
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''Low back merger'' is not accurate, since in some regions (like Arizona, Minnesota or Central Ohio) the vowel is low, central & unrounded, and not low back.
So, cot/caught merger is more precise.
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