The AmE 'o' sound

From: Stewart Gordon (smjg_1998_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/02/04 

Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 15:31:05 +0000

I've noticed on American-oriented dictionaries/wordlists dotted about
the WWW that the sound of the letter 'o' tends to be written as 'ah',
e.g. "KAHNskript".

This has kind-of surprised me, as surely to Americans it's the 'o'
sound. Moreover, in sources that use IPA I've variously seen it written
as /a/, /a:/, /A:/, /A/, /O:/. (For that matter, CALD and CDAE don't
seem to be able to make up their mind.) Here in Britain, /A:/ is used
as in 'father', 'path' and 'cart' (OK, so there are regional
differences), whereas /A./ is our 'o' sound as in 'box'.

To me, 'ah' in a pronunciation would mean /A:/. To my ears, an American
'o' sounds similar but by no means identical to an /A:/. The presence
of renderings of AmE 'o' as 'ah' suggests that it makes sense to some
extent - do many of you across the pond have the same vowel in 'father',
'aunt' etc. as in 'dog', 'box', etc.?

Stewart.

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