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Against the "broad a"
<<Saturday, May 13, 2006: "mok" for "mach"
This should be quick, tho not, perhaps, the speed of sound. There is no CH-sound (as in church) in this word, and the vowel is not an A-sound — not long-A (as in ate), not short-A (as in at). Rather, the vowel is short-O. This same sound is also called broad-A, but for purposes of deciding what vowel to write in order to simplify spelling, we should stick to the concept of each vowel having only two sounds, long and short. No other vowel has a "broad" sound — there's no broad-E, broad-I, broad-O, or broad-U — so we should not retain an A for the "broad-A" sound but substitute O for what is better regarded as a short-O. Put those two principles together and you get "mok".
Because "mach" is invariable — it is not pluralized and cannot be used as a verb — it is an ideal candidate for this kind of change, since you don't have to wonder whether to double the K before adding suffixes. It doesn't take suffixes, unlike its homofone "mock", which can be used as a verb so can take endings (self-mocking, mockery). "Mach", however, can be written, always and ever, simply: "mok".>>
I agree. We really shouldn't refer to a "broad A".
Schoonmaker's drivel only seems to make any sense at all in the context of his own dialect (and the fact that he only takes such into consideration has resulted in some astoundingly bad proposals at time which do not work for even most North Americans).
<This stuff doesn't even make sense for Eastern New Englanders: Like Josh, I distinguish between "mock" ["mQ:k] and "mach" ["mA:k]. >
I also distinguish between mach and mock. I grew up in the midwest of the US. I never pronounce the a in mach as broad-a like the sound in "broad".
Those two words actually don't sound the same to me and I supposedly have a Eastern New England accent, mock sounds /mQk/ and mach sounds with a different sound... I don't have that sound in any other words though I think.
<<Wow, that Schoonmaker guy is an idiot.>>
To see how even more of an idiot he is, check out these comments he made below:
<<''UR, ER, OR, and AR may be pronounced with tiny differences by SOME speakers in SOME dialects as to SOME words. I went to your URL for the Cambridge dictionary, which offers TWO bizarre transliterations (which may or may not be rendered in standard IPA but is opaque to me -- IPA transliterations tend to proceed from the positions of vocal apparatus of the linguists who speak them in preparing to write them; SSWD is concerned about what people HEAR, and if they hear no difference between, for instance, vaann and venn for French "vin", it doesn't matter to them whether the person saying it forms the word one way, because the listener hears it the same no matter which way a speaker might articulate it). Most to the point, the Cambridge dictionary shows TWO pronunciations, British dialect and American standard.
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I then went to the Merriam-Webster URLs for the other words and clicked on the speaker icon to listen to the pronunciations rendered, in American English, and found no distinction worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things. Of course, we could avoid the problem altogether by saying that there are two different pronunciations for "worry", so the word can't be changed!
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For most ordinary , for whom the SSWD project is intended, not for linguistics specialists, there is between a great many word pairs or groups, no difference worth 'worrying' about. There are a lot of overeducated people who have bugaboos about tiny matters of no consequence, and will argue them endlessly, to everyone else's tedium. I'm not about to argue the linguistic equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a subject that may have fascinated some medieval theologians but nobody else.
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The SSWD project is about NEEDED change, and preferably changes that people can readily apply to things they HEAR. One transliteration for a small range of actual sounds is convenient, and all spelling is convention. Few speakers of standard English distinguish in sound between "ferry" and "furry". Having a distinction in spelling for these two HOMONYMS is useful. As to which spelling you favor for a reform of "worry", I have noted that you favor "wurry".
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The problem may be only that a following-R tends to alter the quality of the vowel before it, for some speakers more than others. I have not yet offered this word (which you plainly render "wurd" and I render "werd") and might select "wurry", on the basis that some people might see it as parallel to "merry", which they pronounce like "Mary". Or I may not offer it at all, since, as some people regard things, it has two pronunciations so cannot be changed if a change would antagonize some significant body of speakers. I am asking for more comments. Cheers.
Quote-''YES, I noted that in checking "merge", some dictionaries use the U with a hat as the vowel. But in any case, that is the ER sound, as shown plainly by the sample words in Dictionary.com's own pronunciation key: "urge, term, firm, word, heard".
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As for "ont", I suggested that because "ant" is a homophone we can eliminate from a language filled to overflowing with homophones, and seems to those of us who say "ont" -- meaning a large proportion of the best-educated people in the U.S. and almost everybody in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc. -- that calling a person by a homophone for an insect is arguably disrespectful. I have no power to impose anything, and the SSWD site is designed mainly to make people think. As for "tord", too-waurd is a spelling pronunciation, and as with ev-er-y and other spelling pronunciations (which my Random House Unabridged labels so people know better than to use them), spelling reformers can properly advise people that tho they think they are being careful to be correct, they are actually being wrong.
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The distinction between "ferry" and "furry" is, I repeat, not "worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things." People who try to draw needless distinctions and force people to try to supply only one of essentially interchangeable spellings do spelling reform a disservice. This is not the distinction between "merry" rhyming with "berry" and "merry" rhyming with "Mary". It is TRIVIA that ordinary people do not waste time on and cannot justify wasting educational time and money on. If you see a poem in which one line ends with "ferry" and the next appropriate line ends in "furry" or "worry" or "cherry" or "very", will you be startled by an appalling lack of rhyme? If so, you are one in perhaps 15,000 people.
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Native speakers of English cannot and do not make the short-E as in "bed" and follow it with R in the same syllable and come out with anything like what most people say for "very", "berry", etc. Following-R changes the quality of many vowels in its same syllable.
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Make all the silly and PRETENTIOUS distinctions you want. Ordinary people concerned with communication rather than language as an arcane study to itself will not trouble to heed you.''>>
also:
llama
la Nina
mama
dada
As for "meeracle", here's his comments relating to that.
<<"squert" for "squirt"
"squerm" for "squirm"
IR is an ambiguous spelling for what is ordinarily spelled ER, as in emergency. Think of irritating (which is what I find much of traditional spelling to be). In that word, and others, the IR sounds to most people more like EER, as in "ear". Dictionaries, curiously, show in their pronunciation key simply IR, as tho we really say a short-I before the R-sound in such places. No, the bulk of us do not. The same dictionaries show a short-I for the first E in emergency! Again, most of us do not say a short-I in any such place, but use what is qualitatively a long-E sound, merely articulated for a shorter duration and with no diphthongization (that is, no Y-glide at the end of the E-sound). Perhaps some Brits use a short-I in such places, but they do that even when an E is plainly shown, so their pronunciation shows no reverence for the spelling and should thus not hold back reform of spellings to give non-Brits, and especially the billion or so people trying to learn English as a Second Language, clearer guidance as to how things are pronounced.
The IR in "squirt" and "squirm" is misleading, so should be changed.
The two most common ways of showing the correct sound are ER and UR. Some people think UR is closer, tho ER is far more frequent. Here, however, to employ UR would yield "squurt" and "squurm", which look very odd and would be, for most people, hard to decipher. So ER is by far the better choice: "squert" and "squerm".>>
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