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I've always thought that my dialect was completely merged in its low-back vowels, but that may not be entirely true. I've noticed recently that 'Bach' doesn't rhyme with 'lock' and an informal survey of my family showed that it doesn't for them (it's not the same as 'back' either). It seems to be approximately [bA:k], or maybe [bA_":k]. I think I might even have a minimal pair between 'Dali' and 'dolly', but when I tried to survey my family with this one, they said ["dali:] for 'Dali' so they didn't have the same contrast. I can't think of any other words with this sound right now, and both the ones I've found are borrowings. Have any of you heard of a situation like this?
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That is interesting. Maybe you could say that you have a "xenophoneme" reserved for foreign words? (I'm thinking of something like [dZ] for a German speaker, [S] for a Spanish speaker, [x] or [K] for a British English speaker.)
I was thinking of asking whether you consistently use this vowel in word borrowings with this "foreign a", as it were, like "taco", but then it occurred to me that as a Canadian you would probably use /{/ in a lot of those. So would I be right in saying that you have a pretty small group of words in which to use this distinctive vowel? (I'm thinking of things like "Taj Mahal"?)
In my dialect, all of those words - Bach, Dali, Taj Mahal, taco, pasta - use /A/, my "father" phoneme. This phoneme is realized as near-back unrounded for me. Maybe the distinctive vowel that you use has arisen as a result of the rounded "father" phoneme in your dialect. I mean, I can still use my unrounded [A] as a rough approximation of [a] for foreign words, but perhaps if your "father" vowel is [Q], then in your dialect it becomes unsuitable for foreign words, so a new unrounded vowel has to be created.
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<<I was thinking of asking whether you consistently use this vowel in word borrowings with this "foreign a", as it were, like "taco", but then it occurred to me that as a Canadian you would probably use /{/ in a lot of those. So would I be right in saying that you have a pretty small group of words in which to use this distinctive vowel? (I'm thinking of things like "Taj Mahal"?)>>
I do use /a/ for a lot of borrowings where Americans use /A/, but 'taco' isn't one of them. 'Taco' seems to be ["tQ:ko:], but I find these sounds hard to tell apart without a rhyming pair, since my /Q:/ is only partially rounded. 'Taj Mahal' is odd: ["tadZ m@hA:o]. I assume you use /A:/ for both words? 'Pasta' has /a/ for me. I just thought of another one though: Prague [pr\A:g] doesn't rhyme with fog [fQ:g]. I'll have to check with my family tomorrow. I think your analysis is probably right though: a lot of these words had /{/ in older Canadians' speech, and I suspect the back vowel is a reaction to that, but the rounded vowel that has developed recently is too far from the /a/ that most of these words have in their native language.
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