Talk:Phonological history of English open back vowels/Archive 1

message: The article's reference list has "The Atlas of North American English" of Labov et al, published in 2006. Unless I am stuck in a time vortex of sorts, I do not understand how a book can be referenced BEFORE actually published. If the author of the article has access to the book's manuscript, isn't it illegal to publish parts of it on the Web?
Do enlighten me.
:I don't know when this comment was added, but first of all, preliminary versions of the book have been available on the Internet for several years, and second of all, books often appear toward the end of one year with a copyright date of the following year. Moreover, even if one author did have a book only in pre-published manuscript form, while it would be illegal to post the entire books (or even large chunks of it) here, it's not illegal to use it for research and report on what the book says. Angr (talk • contribs) 11:57, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, looking through the history I see the message above was added December 27 and I added book-specific things like page numbers and the ISBN on December 22, so that must be the day my copy arrived in the mail. It was indeed a case of a book appearing in December but already having the following year as publication date. Angr (talk • contribs) 12:01, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Published in 2006? 

message: the article specifically excludes san francisco(as discussed above, a bit), but the map shows an area much much larger than even just the greater bay area. I see the central coast, down to san luis obispo,a chunk of the central valley, maybe sacramento and halfway up to eureka. My point is that a fairly major chunk of the population of california is going to live within that boundry. San francisco is teeny-tiny in comparison. Which would make san francisco less of a weird blip, and perhaps more of a geographical thing? Anyway. I wasn't sure if the map and the article were entirely in agreement (and the map was just being a bit vague) or whatever. So if it is true that it describes the area i just outlined, then maybe the mention in the article should reflect this. I realize I am not being terribly coherent here, I should stop browsing wikipedia at 2:30 in the morning... Novium 10:33, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem is, the information the map is based on only provides data for northern California from San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno (and the latter two are inside the green line), so in the absence of additional evidence, there's no knowing whether the merger is present in Mendocino, San Luis Obispo, Stockton, etc., or not. The issue has already been discussed a little at my talk page, see User talk:Angr/Archive 11#Image:Cot-caught merger.png. The map is really supposed to be only a rough guide to the locations of the different accents; it would be an enormous undertaking to collect linguistic data from every city and town in the United States and Canada. Angr (talk • contribs) 11:51, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  the map 

message: :(However, it is more likely that the spelling oll reflects the rounding of /ɑ/ before tautosyllabic /l/ found in many English varieties, which is unrelated to the cot-caught merger.)
If you don't already have the cot-caught merger, then "all" won't have  at all, it will have . --Ptcamn 03:04, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed bit