Talk:Cot–caught merger

message: I moved this page off from "Phonological history of English low back vowels" upon request from one of the readers.  This particular section was relatively long in respect to the other sections on the page.  As the cot-caught merger can also be further discussed, I feel that the cot-caught merger deserves its own page.  Thank you.LakeKayak (talk) 15:18, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The split left an error with the references, as can be seen at the bottom of the page. Can you fix this up? Largoplazo (talk) 15:22, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

text: I didn't do anything to Phonological history of English low back vowels. Largoplazo (talk) 15:37, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Overview

message: At one time, I added this line to the page Phonological history of English low back vowels anonymously.  (The line made its way to this page in the split off of that page.)  The original intent was to provide a reference explaining the origins of the merger. However, the more I think about it, the more I think that this line really has little context to the bulleted list.  So, I feel that the line probably should be removed.  Does anybody second this opinion?  Thank you.LakeKayak (talk) 15:50, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  For example, according to PBS, "researchers identified it as a linguistic trend among young Californians some 30 years ago."  See California English for details. 

message: Now I understand what your issue was way back when with calling the notations /ɔ/ and /ɒ/ "conventional".  I thought you meant other notations used in the IPA.  It may be possible to adjust this by simply changing "conventionally represented by" to "conventionally represented in the IPA by".  Over and out.LakeKayak (talk) 01:53, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conventionally represented 

message: Why on earth would we transcribe a glottally masked alveolar stop or especially an unreleased alveolar stop as a glottal stop? Is there a consensus to do that? Sol505000 (talk) 12:52, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: It's quite commonly transcribed that way in the literature: 1, 2, 3. Glottal reinforcement is also commonly transcribed as [ʔt] or [tʔ]. Do you prefer one of those? Wolfdog (talk) 16:59, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  By "it" you mean a glottaly masked alveolar stop, right? It's my understanding that  (as opposed to ) in English involves a released alveolar stop which we can't hear on the recordings. Since we don't know whether the stop is simply unreleased or masked by a glottal stop, it's safer to use a plain . Sol505000 (talk) 17:07, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, you're the one calling it glottally masked. What I hear is certainly not released. How about ? Wolfdog (talk) 17:49, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I see nothing wrong with  as it's the phonemic notation and both glottal reinforcement and no audible release are common in this environment and are not the focus in the context. In any case I'd use , , or  before . Nardog (talk) 11:34, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

text:  works because the diacritic is defined as 'no audible release'.  is even better because, as Nardog says, the exact phonetic realization of  is not the focus in the context. Plus, we don't use the 'no audible release' diacritic in other contexts (apt, doctor, knock down), do we? Sol505000 (talk) 13:37, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, are we making a decision for just this page or for all American English pages? I'm happy to make the ad hoc change here; otherwise, we can bring this discussion to Talk:American English. Thanks for the input. Wolfdog (talk) 00:07, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  isn't a valid transcription of an unreleased alveolar stop without glottalization so yeah, that should be changed. With that being said, I prefer  for the unreleased/glottally masked alveolar stop. The unreleased nature of the stops in apt and doctor is never shown in IPA transcriptions of English. It isn't something that's unique to English (it happens in German and Dutch too) and is shared among all major accents anyway. The lack of it (as in Wales and South Africa) is worth mentioning in prose. There's level of reasonable narrowness of transcription before it becomes too hard to read. I'm mentioning the stops in apt and doctor because they're realized with no audible release with much greater consistency than the final stops in cot and caught which heavily depend on the following sound (or the lack of it). For instance, in the phrase not partially the unreleased  can be realized as an unreleased bilabial plosive (producing an Italian-style geminated ), which would be interpreted as an allophone of  in other contexts (the same thing can happen in German and Dutch). Though even here  is an appropriate transcription because the place of articulation varies between bilabial and simultaneous bilabial and alveolar (and it's unreleased in both cases). But when it's flapped,  is anything but appropriate. Sol505000 (talk) 03:55, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I'd personally prefer  to represent final /t/ on American English pages, since it reminds readers (or suggests to newcomers) that there is almost always a distinction between this /t/ versus the flap or aspirated variants which we also currently represent on such pages. I don't think this would lead to any kind of frightening slippery slope. Wolfdog (talk) 19:49, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Final stops in "cot" and "caught" 

message: The article makes the following uncited claim: 'Some speakers in all three regions, particularly younger ones, are beginning to exhibit the merger despite the fact that each region's phonetics should theoretically block it.' This requires clarification: Is it talking about people who have a weak or weakening regional accent in general? Additionally, it seems to me as someone who is native to and lived all my life in the United States in the same area that the contrast is being preserved by younger speakers in other ways: for example, I hear the /ɒ/ sound much more frequently in pronunciation of written o as in 'lot' (and of words spelled with wa- like "water"), and I also hear /ɔ/ more often in words written with the digraph au (though before r it may sound closer to rhoticized /ɒ/), whereas I used to almost always hear /ɑ/ from people both older and my own age for these same words, as if in the last decade or so people in my area who were undergoing the merger have started shifting their pronunciation again to maintain the distinction. If this observation is correct, then the situation may have entered a new stage in which, for areas that were undergoing or had already undergone the merger, speech with the merger and speech without the merger are "averaging out" their differences to reach some kind of new equilibrium, which makes sense as /ɒ/ has previously not existed in many places in the U.S.A. at least. This change in speech patterns may also be due to increased contact between speakers of General American English and those of other accents by means of technology. I also hear the sound of "medium-long" a in "car" or "María", traditionally pronounced /ɑ/, being advanced a bit to almost but not quite /ä/, which I attribute to both resistance to the merger and the influence of Spanish.  These evidences are anecdotal on my part as I'm not involved in any studies, but in any case I think the claim being made by the article is too strong without a citation, and perhaps also out of date with regard to new developments. Webspidrman (talk) 17:38, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: You mean LOT being as realized [ɒ] and THOUGHT being realized as [ɔ] among these younger speakers? I don't really think this would be possible in North American English. Those are the phonetic values of LOT and THOUGHT respectively in (traditional) Received Pronunciation, where the distinction is kept mostly because THOUGHT is noticeably longer than LOT. In fact, the distinction is being lost in much of NAmEng precisely because vowel length is much less relevant in NAmEng than RP or EngEng as a whole, and NAmEng low vowels are all more or less the same length. In other words, a distinction between [ɒ] and [ɔ] based on quality alone would be very weak and possibly nonexistent.  In much of GenAmEng, the merger very likely took place because the distinction /ɑ/~/ɔ/ began to wane as people began pronouncing /ɔ/ with less lip rounding. Since the two vowels are (unlike in England or Australia) much the same in length, [ɔ] with unrounded lips will end up sounding a lot (pun intended) like [ɑ].  As for /r/, what happens before /r/ really is irrelevant, as vowels before /r/ have gone their own way in NAmEng. 78.7.67.250 (talk) 20:49, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: New Developments since the 1990's?

message: The article is not well comprehensible. After reading the intro you would think, that in regions with cot-caught and father-bother merger "nor" rhymes with "far". However, that's not the case as far as I know. "or", "nor", "for", "four", "north" are almost always pronounced with an /ɔ/. It should me meantioned in the article.   A11w1ss3nd (talk) 15:18, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  nor doesn't rhyme with far 

message: According to the map from the article, there is evidence of the cot-caught merger taking hold in the area of the United States that speaks North Central American English, specifically northern Minnesota and North Dakota. As such, does this refer more to the regular or conventional pronunciation of "caught" as "awe,"(/ɔ/) or the more commonly associated pronunciation "ah" (/ɑ~ɔ/; "Brought" becomes "Brat")? It would be interesting to have a clarification on this, as it's unclear whether it is a developing feature in this area, or if there really hasn't been that much of a merger like other parts of the country.
Wiscipidier (talk) 19:31, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I keep reading your question but not understanding it. Can you please rephrase? Wolfdog (talk) 18:34, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cot-Caught Merger in North Central American English