Re: The "u" and "v" in older written English is confvsing


"Richard Wordingham" <jrw0602@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
"John Atkinson" <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
"Richard Wordingham" <jrw0602@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
Richard Wordingham <jrw0602@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A great many English speakers do not know how to pronounce
"won" - they pronounce it with a short 'o'. (I was
going to write '/wA.n/ or equivalent', but that is
probably less clear a statement.)

Where? I don't think that I've ever heard a native speaker
do this.

Certainly in England. I don't know whether the distribution parallels the pronunciation of _one_ as /wA.n/ - that pronunciation is supposed to be commoner in Northern England.

Surely in northern England they're both /wUn/ (since the STRUT/FOOT split didn't take place there).

I presume this is a reference to Wells's labels, but they're horrible examples, deriving from Old English _stru:t_ and _fo:t_ respectively. SUN / PUSH might be a better description. Although Modern English has developed a three-way split BLOOD / GOOD / MOOD, Standard /U/ has many sources. For example, the shortening of <-ook> to /Uk/ from /u:k/ has not happened in areas further south than the non-splitting of the short reflexes of Old English *u, and I spent much of my childhood in a village where <glove> was /glu:v/ (the regular development of the oblique forms of Old English _glo:f_). This village lacked the SUN / PUSH split.

Except for people who are trying to acquire a near-RP accent, of course, who I suppose may well approximate RP /V/ using [A.], since they don't have [V] in their local dialect. Are these the people you're thinking of?

Unlikely, since any non-standard [A.] for [V"] occurred in words spelt with <o>.

[V"]? Is that how you/they pronounce the SUN vowel? 'V" ' is, IIRC, Kirshenbaum for backwards epsilon, so that its long version [V":] is the vowel in nurse and girl, which, for me (and also in typical RP, AIUI) is quite a long way from SUN, and close to [@:].

Anyway, to the point. Do these folk have [A.] for _all_ SUN words spelled with <o> (done, come, love, mother, stomach, monk, tongue, onion, money, front)? What about words spelled <ou> (touch, enough, young, double, southern, country) and <oo> (blood, flood)?

Or is it restricted to words starting with /w/. If so, does it occur in <worry> and <wonder> too, or just <won> and <one>?

Possibility (1): it occurs in all these <o> words and is either [Speculation (a)] a comparatively recent spelling pronunciation by people who previously had [U]; or [Speculation (b)] a retention from the time before the rest of us southerners changed from [A.] to [V] in these words -- i.e., around or a bit after the time the standard spelling was established several centuries ago.

Possibility (2): It occurs just in <wo>=RP/wV/ words (all four of them), and [Speculation (c)] is an extension of the change /w&/ > /wA./ (what, was, Wally, ...) in the standard language to /wV/ > /wA./ as well, which, for non-obvious reasons, neveer happened with the rest of us.

Just speculatin'.

John.

.

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