Separated by a Common Language

To describe a general American accent will lead you astray. Our northern neighbors sound very little like those of us from the South, and they make countless errors in pronunciation, due probably to their large immigration of Italians, Polish, Irish, Puerto Ricans and Scandinavians.

I don't think so. The problem is that British and Americans have a different sets of vowels to work with when trying to make the /o/ sound one finds in other languages. I typed this all out and then lost it, so please have a look at my reply to David Crosbie below, since it makes much the same point!

More precisely Americans feel the need to employ a (relatively) 'authentic' set of vowelswhen trying to make the /o/ sound from other languages. We just don't feel that need, and stick with the objectively strange set we've inherited.

Long vowels: American English, like Scottish English, does not have distinctive vowel length. The length of a vowel depends on the following consonant. So for us, vowel quality is what's important. Our TRAP vowel is far forward and doesn't match either French "a" or "â" (in varieties of French that distinguish); the PALM vowel is the nearest in quality, so we use it for French "a".

Milan: This is not an anglicization of Milano. Rather Milano is an italianization of Milan, the native (Lombard) name of the city. In German, it's called Mailand, literally 'May land', by folk etymology, because Germans think of Italy as the land of eternal spring.

Yes, I knew about American/Scottish lack of actual distinctive vowel length. Nevertheless,don't you preserve the historic opposition in the names of the vowel letters — using, like us, the reflex of historical 'long' pronunciation?

[As I suspect you know, the length of a vowel in Scottish English (for many speakers at least) depends on the following morpheme.]

Another departure I've heard in American speech, in addition to the A and O examples, is the pronunciation of beta with a 'foreign' value for the historic long-E. In my non-rhotic speech it sounds the same as beater.

For the Spanish i vowel, the most popular pronunciation of Ibiza mixes
• out-and-out British value for the first vowel .................. aɪ
• British/American value for the first consonant ............... b
* approximate authentic value for the second vowel......... iː
• Castilian Spanish value for the second consonant......... θ
• British/American value for the final vowel ...................... ə

"I wonder if UK pronunciation comes from the fact that "-os" in Spain rhymes with "doss", not "dose".

Wait, what? I've never heard any Spanish word that rhymed​ with doss or loss. I'm not from Spain, but during five years of Spanish classes I was taught that vowels in Spanish are always pronounced the same way, pretty much without exception.

A = ah
E = ay
I = ee
O = oh
U = oo

Unless Spain has recently changed the rules, I'm not sure how any "os" word could be said without making it rhyme with dose.

James

That teaching device only worked because the teacher knew how you personally pronounce oh and the others. More than that, he or she knew how you pronounce words like doss.

It wouldn't work with Helen or with me because we have a very different set of O-sounds from yours.

That's why a phonetician called John Wells invented lexical sets — collections of words with the same vowel sound in each accent.
• Doss is one of a set of words named LOT.
• Dose is one of a set of words named GOAT.

The difference between these sounds is psychological — we rely on recognising the sound to know what word is being said. This works perfectly with someone speaking in our own accent. And it works pretty well with someone speaking English in another accent. But when we hear a foreign sound such as a Spanish o, we can't match it as identical with one or other of our own o-sounds. Our brains can only recognise that it's close to something familiar. To Helen and me, that familiar sound is LOT. To you it's GOAT.

We can't really go any further without speaking face-to-face or using phonetic symbols. The International Phonetic Association symbol o represents a sound which is close to Spanish O and close to North American GOAT. But psychologically it's a million miles away from GOAT in most accents of England Wales and Ireland. For me, and I suspect for Helen, the closest IPA representation of our GOAT vowel would be the two symbols əʊ. This a sliding sound starting with a sort of grunt (like the sound at the end of letter), and continuing with with the lips and tongue moving to form the sound of FOOT.

Similarly, your North American LOT vowel is pretty close to Spanish A. The IPA symbol used is ɑ. Your LOT words probably sound the same as your PALM words. But our LOT words feel a million miles away from our PALM words. True, there's a a physical similarity in how our mouths form them — the LOT sound has the tongue in the same posture, but the lips are rounded in what feels to us as the natural O-shape. Some dictionaries represent our LOT sound with the same symbol as your THOUGHT sound (ɔ). But it's probably better to use a completely different symbol — ɒ.

Find some British speakers on YouTube — or in real life — and listen carefully. The sounds soon become recognisable.

I was going to make a similar point - Pirates of the CarribBEan is probably to blame for younger people adopting that pronunciation across the Americas instead of CarRIBbean.

I grew up in the Caribbean and it was never ever pronounced "Carib-be-an". We always said, and I still say,'Ca-rib-be-an'. Americans were the only ones I'd ever heard pronouncing it "Carib-be-an', which I thought was an affectation.

What an interesting observation, Cathy. I grew up in California and always referred to that ride with the CaribbEAN pronunciation, but still referred to the region as the CaRIBbean. Until this moment, I never realized the inconsistency.

Not sure I understand this point. In both pronunciations of Caribbean, in both countries (in my experience), the -an just a syllabic 'n'--no full vowel with it.

There's more reason for Americans to think Greek o is tense vowel than that it's a lax one. In general, if pronouncing European words, you're better off assuming more Spanish-like vowels, since English vowel spelling has been entirely messed up by the Great English Vowel Shift. Our pronunciation of /o/ comes out as the extra long [oʊ]. That's the closest vowel to Greek's that AmE has. But RP's GOAT vowel is more centralized, and so its lax LOT vowel might well be closer to a Greek /o/. But an American LOT would be much furɑːther from /o/, since it's /a/.

The difference in how we pronounce these vowels extends to how we hear them--a victim of 'categorical perception'--that we automatically fit what we hear into the sound categories we have.

You explain why phonetically trained Americans avoid a LOT pronunciation for Spanish ɑ. I'm still unsure why untrained readers-aloud don't employ the common-sense spelling pronunciation. My best guess is that it's the pull of the similarities with your own o vowel rather than the push of the dissimilarity to your ɑ vowel.

There's been some break in continuity over there. Here in most British accents the LOT vowel started as objectively similar to the Spanish pronunciation of O, and the two sounds continued to be equated as our LOT vowel changed over time to present ɒ. Thus the two sounds are psychologically the same — perceived as such though measurably different.

As for the Greek words, the rule (sometimes broken) is that we have followed the distinction signalled by two distinct letters of the Greek alphabet.

• ο (omicron) has been pronounced with the LOT vowel of the day
This is the vowel of κύδος (kudos), παθός (pathos), κόσμος (cosmos) — ΝΟΤ *κὐδως, *παθώς, *κὀσμως.

• ω (omega) has been pronounced (less consistently) with the GOAT vowel of the day
This is the vowel of ἥρως ('hero'), Ἰω (Io), Πλάτων (Plato) — NOT *ἥρος, *Ἰο, *Πλἀτον.

Once upon a time these were the objectively similar o and oː. They don't feel any less similar now that they're ɒ and əʊ. Indeed, some of us at least still speak of short o and long o.

[Yes there are quite a few exceptions to the rule mapping Classical Greek to English O-values. But these seem to result from historic processes internal to English — notably lengthening 'short o' when it bore the word stress.]

The difference in how we pronounce these vowels extends to how we hear them--a victim of 'categorical perception'--that we automatically fit what we hear into the sound categories we have.

I suspect it's the other way round. The way we apply our sound categories extends to the pronunciations we hear. For some reason the two British sound categories in question have never dissociated themselves from the alphabetical letter O.

I realise not everybody still uses the terms long o and short o. But surely we all use the GOAT vowel to pronounce the name of letter-O.

David: because it's not a common-sense spelling pronunciation unless you are used to pronouncing -os words as -oss. What counts as 'common sense' in spelling/pronunciation is only 'common' in a particular spelling/pronunciaition system. Americans look at -os endings, don't see the double 's' that tells them it's the 'LOT' vowel, so say it with the vowel they use in other -os words, which includes plurals with -os (though those we pronounce with a /z/, which also accounts for the pronunciation of 'kudos' that some dictionaries have first).

The only -os word I can think of that I'd pronounce with the LOT vowel is the acronym DOS, and I only pronounce it that way because I've heard other say it. If that weren't the case, I'd have no reason to not say it like the Spanish number or the plural of the nouned verb 'do'.

Yes of course I meant common sense to me. The British system may be wrong-headed, but it is simpler and essentially conservative. It hasn't involved reassigning Spanish and Greek vowels from LOT to GOAT just because the phonetic realisations have changed.

The ‑os plural is interesting for another reason. In the past it justified a spelling with an apostrophe (tomato's, potato's) when they were unfamiliar new foodstuffs to show that the words were not SINGULAR forms — and therefore pronounced OSS.

So how do you pronounce ostrich, prospect, hospital? The British spelling pronunciation is the same for ‑os whether or not it's followed by another consonant letter. (Of course, a following vowel letter does make a difference.)

There are problems in relying on both final ‑ose and ‑oss spellings as guides to pronunciation. The former may suggest a rhyme with doze and the latter points to both floss and gross.

I think the different spelling pronunciations here reflect a difference between what we mark a 'foreign' and outside the usual rule.

• You have a 'foreign exception' condition for sound — which allows you to associate 'long o' pronunciation with what was a short-o spelling in Greek.
• We have a 'foreign exception' condition for spelling — which allows us to associate LOT pronunciation with final ‑os spelling.

Your system is more complicated in that it doesn't automatically assign historic 'short' value before a single final consonant in the exceptional case of O. For the other vowel letters we have slab, fret, bin, hob, plug. For both systems, final ‑s is exceptional. Before other consonants we have blob, bloc, plod, dog, amok, nytol, from, nylon, hop, hot, fox, Boz. For you the exceptionality of O is totally consistent (apart from DOS). For us the exceptionality is only partially consistent.

PS
How do you handle the abbreviated names Jos. and Ros? The latter (for me) has a LOT vowel — albeit with a /z/ sound for final consonant. (When I was young my surname was abbreviated to Cros pronounced KROZZ.)

"How do you handle the abbreviated names Jos. and Ros?"

Mostly by not using them. 8-)

If a Joseph is abbreviated other than to "Joe", it's likely to become "Joss", which has the the expected pronunciation.

And the spelling for an abbreviated Rosalyn would likely be "Roz".

David: It just doesn't make sense to talk about Spanish or Greek having a GOAT vowel. Those are descriptions that were invented to describe the English vowel system. When I hear a Spanish or Greek 'o', I hear a tense /o/. It's shorter than English GOAT vowels because that vowel is a diphthong. But it doesn't make sense to call it the LOT vowel.

I'm not saying they have a GOAT vowel or a LOT vowel. Though I am saying that Greek had long O and short O.

My pronunciation of Spanish — when speaking English, of course — is based on spelling-to-sound considerations. For that reason my ear translates an actual Spanish o to a perceived approximation to my LOT vowel.

My pronunciation of Classical Greek words is similarly based on spelling-to-sound — reinforced by my knowledge that kudos, pathos, cosmos were all spelled with omicron (short o). There was a time when I regularly heard Classical Greek spoken by teachers and lecturers. They used whatever British English vowel sound was a plausible approximation to what scholars believe the pronunciation to have been.

I've been on about LOT and GOAT because it allows us to think both about oppositions in the past when length was distinctive and oppositions in the present when length is only partly a feature in British accents and not at all in American. Yet the opposition is still there and still associated with the letter O.

The opposition in the past is interesting because our LOT vowel would once have sounded rather like the Spanish O-sound of the day. And the LOT-GOAT opposition would once have resembled the Classical Greek omicron-omega opposition.

LOT, GOAT and the rest were invented to describe and discuss the English vowel system without being too distracted by the actual sounds.

OK, I think I see what you were picking up on. I wrote:

It hasn't involved reassigning Spanish and Greek vowels from LOT to GOAT just because the phonetic realisations have changed.

What I meant was that Anglicised Spanish words and Anglicised Greek words were originally assigned pronunciations with the LOT vowel of the day. We have continued to do this, while you have reassigned them to pronunciations with the GOAT vowel of the day.

I live in California, where most of our place names are anglicized from Spanish. My "long o" is default for a Spanish o, perhaps because my "short o" is closer to a Spanish "a."

David: what is your evidence that the borrowings were originally LOT-vowel in English? Especially for those that were borrowed after AmE and BrE split?

Also confused by the claim that AmE has no long/short distinction, since long/short vowel is what distinguishes our 'can' from our 'can't'.

I took the 'short o' set to be the default. There is some supporting evidence.

• The 'long o' set was an innovation — not descended from the Old English long o words. For a time the new set and the Old English derived set co-existed: the books I read transcribe the vowels as ɔː and oː respectively.

• This ɔː vowel really does seem to be a longer version of the 'short o' — which everyone transcribes as ɔ. Indeed, a major source of the new vowel was a lengthening of previously short o in open syllables.

* A set of loanwords that we do know about is from French. Here the O sounds were absorbed into what eventually became English LOT — with one exception. If the resulting English word had stress on the syllable with o, then the syllable took what eventually became the GOAT vowel.

So here's the negative evidence; the Spanish borrowings with ‑os produced a syllable which was
• not open
• not stressed

Not a watertight case, but pretty suggestive.

As for words that were borrowed after AmE and BrE split, we just assigned spelling pronunciations that were analogous with previous borrowings.

[An interesting contrast with borrowed stressed A, with an early pattern like potato and a later pattern like tomato.]

And I didn't mean to claim that AmE had no long/short distinction at all. My point was that this particular historical long/short distinction — ɔː/ɔ, GOAT/LOT — disappeared in AmE as a (as a natural pair, that is).

As John Cowan observed, in AmE 'the length of a vowel depends on the following consonant.'

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I think your LOT is about the same as my "cord," which I think is an allophone of GOAT when an r or l follows. (I don't otherwise have that vowel.) But do potato and tomato really not rhyme for you?

Julie, assuming you really want to know: Brits refer to a po-tay-toe and a tom-ah-toe, each with a T consonant, never a D, for the final syllable.

Julie, lexical sets don't work like that.

John Wells invented sets like LOT and GOAT as a tool. They allow us to discuss the differences between accents — which is incredibly hard for any but trained phoneticians, especially in writing. The sets also allow us to discuss changes in pronunciation over time.

Ignoring the Spanish and Greek ‑os words at the margin, there's a vast number of words about whose pronunciation we can make a simple observation. For the LOT lexical set, John lists these examples

sop, pot, sock, notch, Goth,
rob, odd, cog, dodge,
Tom, con, doll,
solve, romp, font, copse, dos,
profit, possible, proverb, bother, rosin,
honest, ponder, ...:
swan, quality, yacht, wasp, watch, squabble,
waffle, ...;
knowledge, acknowledge.

Now cord is quite distinct from this set. John's term for the set it belongs to is the NORTH set. Here are a few examples :

or, orb, corn, porpoise, order, warm, aura

In my accent, words in this set are pronounced the same as words in the FORCE set. Here's a sample to illustrate the spellings or words in this set:

ore, boar, floor, four, deport, coarse, court, oral, gloria, hoary.

In American accents this tends not to be the case. Many of you pronounce for and four differently. Phoneticians compare these using symbols which most people can't interpret. But it takes little training to understand FORCE and NORTH.

Another interesting observation that can be made using these sets is that in the non-regional General American accent important is a NORTH word, while in other accents it's a FORCE word.

Now in my accent both NORTH and FORCE words sound the same as THOUGHT words — except that I sometimes insert an R-sound.

[The rule is that we pronounce an R-sound corresponding to the R-spelling only when a vowel sound follows immediately. So everyone with an accent like mine says

lore-R-and language.

Some of us go further and treat THOUGHT words the same even though there's no R spelling. Thus

law-R-and order

This is extremely common, but ridiculed by others as a woman obsessed with crime whose name is

Laura Norder.]

So, to compare your accent and mine, we need to know
• whether you have the same sound for NORTH and FORCE
• whether you have a different sound for THOUGHT

When we know this, we can attempt to describe the vowel sounds in the three sets. On paper and on screen

• my LOT sound can be represented by ɒ.
• my NORTH, FORCE,and THOUGHT sound can be represented by ɔː

John Wells observes that in General American (your accent may be different)
• the LOT sound can be represented by ɑ
•the NORTH sound can be represented by ɔr
• the FORCE sound can be represented by or

To hear exactly what these symbols represent, there's a wonderful facility supplied by the Universty of Victoria. When it works, you click on a symbol and hear the sound. Unfortunately it relies on an old plug-in which you may need to restore to your computer.

Using lexical sets, biochemists's explanation of the vowels (in BrE) can be rephrased:

•The second vowel of tomato is a PALM sound
• The second vowel of potato is a FACE sound

David,

Isn't amok properly pronounced with the same vowel as but? That's what my (old) Chambers gives, with no alternative pronunciation, but alternative spelling of amuck. I have heard people pronounce it to rhyme with sock, but assumed they had learnt the word from reading and wrongly guessed the pronunciation. Perhaps modern sources give that as a recognised alternative now, though?

Personally I always rhyme amok with sock. John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists the UCK variant as secondary in British RP and primary in General American.

That does surprise me. Is that the latest (2008) edition? If so, perhaps it reflects a change in standard pronunciation? What does the OED give? On the other hand, the old Chambers shows it is from a Malay word, amoq ("frenzied"), which suggests your pronunciation.

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I've checked the latest edition of Wells through Amazon and Look inside . No change.

The online OED — not fully updated — gives only əˈmɒk.

Although a Malay word, we got it from the Portuguese versions amouco , and amuco, and these Portugues spellings were used in the earliest English quotes. Other English spellings have been amock and amuk.

Both are pronunciation of soviet are 'wrong', Dick. A moderately authentic approximation to the Russian would be suh-VYETT

But I don't think anyone is saying that Barbados (or cosmos) are pronounced with final 'z' sound, are they? Are you saying you do?

Yes, I do

AmE I would say I typically hear this male first name pronounced as A-mus. Rhymes with famous as in the chocolate chip cookie brand Famous Amos. Perhaps you’re looking for your ‘gotcha’ moment to prove your BrE pronunciation of Barbados is somehow correct and AmE is incorrect by using this –os ending as an example. I know an Amos from South America and one from western Africa and both pronounce their name as AH-mose. I have no problem hearing people pronouncing the same words differently, in fact it’s very interesting and educational and it's what I like reading about on this blog. What a boring place we’d live in if everyone spoke English like the Queen of England and claimed it to be THE correct way.

I despise the idea of a pronunciation being 'correct', Jane Elizabeth.

I should have said 'for a healthy sober mature native speaker'. It's OK to describe the pronunciations (and other language features) of babies, foreigners and drunks as 'incorrect'.

I was genuinely interested in what the answer to my question would be. Your answer, Jane Elizabeth, was interesting and unexpected.

Well I say "AH-moss" by default, but that has more to do with the Hebrew pronunciation of the prophet of that name and the book of the Bible named after him. He does not come up in conversation outside my religious circle enough for me to default to the Anglicized pronunciation (or even to know what it might be) like I would for Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, etc. I don't really encounter Ahttps://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/logout?d=https://www.blogger.com/logout-redirect.g?blogID%3D28787909%26postID%3D7073635721143757276moses outside this context very much, though I've heard of Famous Amos.

Sorry about that URL getting in there somehow. I wish the system allowed us to modify our posts

My first vowel is A as in the letter A, and the second is a schwa. I probably first knew it from "Amos and Andy" (not that I ever listened to Amos and Andy) and I think there was an Amos on the Waltons or some similar program(me) when I was a kid--but I've never met an Amos.

Boris

The trick is to
• Copy the text of your posting
• Start a new post
• Paste in the text and edit it
• Publish the new post
• Delete your original post

David,

"It's OK to describe the pronunciations (and other language features) of babies, foreigners and drunks as 'incorrect'"

Americans are foreigners! You're all wrong, Americans, haha!

Even this could be defended. An American actor attempting to portray a British character with a British accent can make a mistake which we might describe as 'incorrect'.

Famously:

https://youtu.be/B_rVzBt20N0

No, it's bar-bay-dose, as it is in Barbados. Not saying that Americans are trying to say the whole word as if it is Spanish, but that we interpret final -os as being "-ose" across many words, and that could be a Spanish effect.

Having an "other-language effect" in a word can be very specific to sounds, as when BrE speakers make Spanish z into 'th', but then Anglici{s/z}e the vowels, cf. Ibiza.

Not a part of my (AmE) idiolect. Without research I would not really understand what is meant by the phrase.

After research, I think "bum around" or "goldbrick" (probably obs. at this point) might be related but not equivalent.

No, that's why I put (BrE) before it, with a link to Oxford dictionaries.

Actually, I most often hear "Los" Vegas here in England, which I think is by analogy with Los Angeles, but a gramatical error in the original Spanish, of course.

My explanation for this, as a Brit who has lived in the US for many years, is that the vowel Americans use (allowing for regional variation) when saying the 'Las' of 'Las Vegas' sounds to British ears very different from the LASS vowel of British English and closer to the LOSS vowel. In fact, it's somewhere in between. And the difference between the initial vowels of Las Vegas and Los Angeles in American-speak probably doesn't come across strongly if you have already heard the first one as the LOSS vowel.

Sorry for the untechnical explanation, but I can't speak IPA.

Interesting, but in a comment not threaded with this one, Kirk Poore, a Californian, suggests many Americans also say Los (as in "loss") Vegas.

Zouk: if you ask an American if we say "Loss" Vegas, most of us would say yes. But it sounds nothing like if a Brit said "Loss Vegas". My "loss" is more like "lahss" than like BrE 'loss'. This difference in our "short o" vowels is at the heart of many of our cod-phonetic writing miscommunications.

For the same reason the A sound in the word 'genealogy' can be confusing. Listening to an American expert on the topic, I realised that she was pronouncing the third vowel as 'ah', so it sounded as if she was saying 'geneOlogy'.

In SoCal AmE -- when we are speaking English and are not attempting to make the original Spanish sounds of our adopted words -- dos, burros, tacos, alamo, amigo all have the same o sound.

The AmE pronunciation of los, as in Los Angeles, has the same sound as lost, floss, moss. It does not rhyme with dos.

I would say something like "pah-thos" (with the last syllable rhyming with the way Lynne pronounces the last syllable of "Barbados").

But since I don't really hear the word, that pronunciation is mostly just the way I hear it in my head when I read it.

It looks like Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pathos) might prefer what I think of as the BrE pronunciation, since it is listed first, but my pronunciation is listed "also". 8-)

I woke up this morning afraid that I'd written something very silly. I feared I'd been misled by a particular sort of language feel — one that stems from study.

Because of what I've been reading and re-reading about the history of English, I've developed a feel for sound-to-spelling and spelling-to-sound over time. So it seemed blindingly obvious what happened to the word pathos. Only on waking did I realise that my feel only suggested what could have happened. What if pathos was borrowed only recently?

To my relief, what I wrote proves to be only slightly silly. The earliest use known to the OED is from Spenser, spelled παθὀς in the original 1579 publication, then transliterated pathos in the 1591 edition. The is not before the Great Vowel Shift — but neither is it after.

So I turned to David Crystal's Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation which reflect's Spenser's date. Shakespeare didn't use the word pathos but there's a clear parallel in famous (stressed a-sound) vs infamous (undressed a-sound). According to Crystal, Shakespeare and Spenser would have pronounced the former (but not the latter) with a 'long a' something like the sound at the start of the diphthong in pear.

So the essence of my reply stands — despite the silliness of assuming that pathos is a very old borrowing.

David

"famous (stressed a-sound) vs infamous (undressed a-sound)"

I'm guessing you wrote this before you changed out of your pyjamas!

Famous, fame and similar words entered English long before the Great Vowel Shift, which is when the stressed/unstressed distinction was important.

Pyjamas didn't enter English before the nineteenth century. And even then it appeared a par jamas (1801), pigammahs (1834) and pajamas (1844) — a spelling which still exists as a variant — then finally pyjamas (1878).

As I've just been writing further down, recent foreign words with a-letter spelling and/or A-type sound are assimilated into the BATH set of words

All very interesting, but I think you may have missed the point of my comment.

I took your point to be that the second vowel in pyjamas is also stressed. My point is that condition of stress leading to a FACE vowel obtained a long time ago — but no longer by the nineteenth century.

Pretty sure he was just riffing on your typo where you wrote undressed for unstressed ...

That pesky spellchecker!

I hope you won't be offended, David, if I say that the larger point is that the undoubted value of your erudite contributions, underpinned by your large collection of resources, is only too often undermined by such errors. While these are usually trivial, like the "undressed" example (though not usually so amusing), sometimes they are in places critical to the essence of your message. I'm sure your comments would be appreciated even more if you took more trouble in proof-reading them before publication, perhaps doing away with the services of your mischevious automatic spell-checker in favour of meticulous checking by eye. I usually preview my comments a number of times before publishing and errors still creep in sometimes.

Rats. To fix: ...I always thought Ca-RIB-be-an was only used by TV newsmen.

I'm assuming you have the "cot-caught merger" (or at least you think you do). A lot of people from where I grew up in the Midwest make a distinction between "Los" and "Las" in those place names ("loss" /lɔːs/ and "lahs" /lɑːs/, respectively). Well, actually some people (including me) make a 3-way distinction between /lɔːs/, /lɑːs/ and /loʊs/ The latter pronunciation is used in names like "Los Pollos Hermanos" or any other names that feel a lot more foreign and Spanish-y than, e.g., "Los Angeles."

Anonymous,

In my accent and, I believe, in all other British accents a word-final LOT vowel is psychologically impossible — even in accent like Irish and Scottish with very different LOT vowels. If we read a foreign word spelled with final letter-o, or if we hear a foreign word ending in a sound like o, we consistently Anglicise with a GOAT sound. In my accent this is a diphthong, perhaps best represented as əʊ.

Foreign words like taco are generally assimilated into the BATH set. This is a rather complex collection of subsets:
• words which always choose a PALM vowel
• words which choose a TRAP vowel in Australian and West Indian accents while the rest of the accent's BATH set choose a PALM vowel
• words which choose TRAP vowel in the North of England and a PALM vowel in the South (and in the speech of some social climbers in the North)
• words which consistently choose TRAP in standard General American , but vacillate between TRAP and PALM in Standard British RP.

In none of these subsets is there a third choice. It's either the TRAP of that particular accent or the PALM of that accent.

It seems safest to consider taco as being in the last sub-set. So in RP it might be either ˈtækəʊ (plural ˈtækəʊz) or ˈtɑːkəʊ (plural ˈtɑkəʊz). In my almost-RP accent, I'd say it was slightly closer to ˈtakəʊ.

Anonymous

We don't hear Cockney much nowadays. Middle class Londoners tend to speak RP or modified RP or a regional accent known as Estuary, which has displaced Cockney for many working class speakers. Young Londoners increasingly tend to speak in an accent heavily influenced by immigrant speakers, notably but not exclusively from the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, this is the accent which recent immigrants acquire.

John Wells describes a London accent which has a vowel system structurally very similar to RP — except for the diphthongs which lie on a spectrum between RP and 'Broad Cockney'. He uses the same symbols as for RP in the cases of TRAP, DRESS and PALM. So pasta can't really rhyme with Vesta. I can't think of a pair for mafia but Yugoslavia can't rhyme with heavier.

A British accent with a TRAP vowel approaching ɛ is the largely defunct 'Advanced RP' stereotypically associated with upper-class Bright Young Things and shop assistants trying to copy them. In the Southern hemisphere, New Zealand is infamous for raising the TRAP vowel to the extent that even some Australians hear it as ɛ. But in both accents the DRESS vowel is also raised — in the direction of or even far as e — so the distinction is maintained.

In any accent (I think), if a word like taco or mafia chooses a PALM vowel rather than a TRAP vowel, then the contrast with the DRESS vowel is total and obvious.

My apologies for messing up the subcategories of the BATH set. Fortunately I got the final subset right — the one which contains words like taco — but I made a pig's ear of the first three. The actual subsets are as follows:

• words pronounced by one set of accents (North of England, North America) in the same way as the accent's TRAP vowel, but by another set of accents (South of England, Souther Hemisphere, Caribbean) in the same way as the accents PALM vowel. In the North of England some speakers affect a PALM vowel as a mark of higher social status.

• words which may be exceptions in Southern Hemisphere or Caribbean accents, pronounced with a TRAP vowel rather than the usual PALM.

• words which are often exceptions in North-of-Englan accents, pronounced with a PALM vowel rather than the usual TRAP.

To complicate affairs still further, Wells recognises a subset of PALM words whose vowel is ɑː in RP but fluctuates between ɑ and æ in General American. In this subset he includes Colorado and soprano. Tacos were not widely known in Britain when John compiled the sets and their contents, so it's not listed in any subset. But in his Dictionary he lists ˈtækəʊ or ˈtɑːkəʊ for RP — which places the word in that subset of BATH words. But for General American he lists ˈtɑːkoʊ — which places the word in that PALM subset.

AmE speaker -- Domestos is not available in the U.S. as far as I know, and I've never heard of it before just now, but when I read the name in your post I pronounced it with the long o, same as I say Barbados. If I were to speak of the island of Lesbos, I'd say it with the long o. The Wikipedia entry gives the U.S. pronunciation as US: /ˈlɛzboʊs/, and that looks right to me.

[The problem was, that every time I tried to preview a Reply consisting of the last sentence above, the text would simply be deleted and I would be left with an empty Reply box again. I tried reloading the page, but then I couldn't even get a Reply box up; there was simply no response when I clicked on "Reply".]

Does he sing it or is it just the backing singers? I agree that sounds more like a BrE 'loss' than how I say it, but I wouldn't usually go with singing as a first choice for telling what people's pronunciations are like!

"Does he sing it or is it just the backing singers?"

Hmm... yeah, maybe it's just the backing singers. Ironic, isn't it, that the pronunciation is non-Spanish, even though the sentence is itself (arguably) in Spanish?! Here are some Texans singing the same song. It's still pretty clearly an o vowel, but maybe not quite like my (SE English) one:

https://youtu.be/gOoKzw3JSCM

"I wouldn't usually go with singing as a first choice for telling what people's pronunciations are like!"

Good point. I think the cod American accents British pop/rock performers tend to use has been discussed elsewhere on this blog (but maybe only in comments). I tried to find a recording of Elvis talking about the place but couldn't find one. However, I did find a radio interview of the Las Vegas Hilton's manager by an English interviewer. Interestingly, the Englishman pronounces with a, while the resident definitely uses an o:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PMEjpnmpC4

John Wells proposes four Types of accents distinguished by the distribution of stressed vowel and consonant phonemes in four Part-systems.

Part-system A vowels which only occur as 'checked' i.e. immediately followed by a consonant sound in the same syllable or the following syllable of the same word.

Part-system B front, relatively close (aka high) vowels + diphthongs with a front. relatively close endpoint

Part-system C back, relatively close (aka high) vowels + diphthongs with a back. relatively close endpoint

Part-system D relatively open vowels + diphthongs with a relatively open endpoint

These characterise the four Types as follows:

Type I accents (including Barbadian and some Southern Irish) have
• six A vowels — typical values ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʊ, ʌ, ɒ
• four B sounds — typical values iː, eː, aɪ, ɔɪ
• three C sounds — typical values aʊ, uː, oː
• two D vowels — typical values aː, ɔː


Type II accents (RP and many other British accents, plus Southern Hemisphere accents) have
• six A vowels — typical values ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʊ, ʌ, ɒ
• four B sounds — typical values iː, eɪ, aɪ, ɔɪ
• three C sounds — typical values əʊ, aʊ, uː
• six D sounds — typical values ɪə, ɛə, ɜː, ɑː, ʊə, ɔː

In these two types the A part-system comprises the historical short vowels. Each maintains a psychological connection with the reflex of a long counterpart — which is indeed longer. The connection is reinforced through learning to read, which exposes us to spelling relationships and to the names we use for vowel letters (in my accent eɪ, iː, aɪ, əʊ, juː)

Type III accents (notably North American) have
• only five A vowels — typical values ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʊ, ʌ
• four B sounds — typical values i, eɪ, aɪ, ɔɪ
• four C sounds — typical values aʊ, u, o, ɑ
• one D vowel — typical value ɔ

The differences from Types I and II are that
— the vowel of LOT words has shifted from Part-system A to Part-system C
— the long vowels in Part-systems B, C and D have lost their distinctive length

[I use the Present Perfect because the current state is the result of what happened in history.]

As a result, it no longer makes sense in American accents to characterise part-system A as 'short vowels'. Thus the association between LOT and GOAT is not the psychological reality that it is for Brits like me. What we do and you don't do is — when using a spelling pronunciation — to perceive foreign words with O-sounds as corresponding to the unmarked set of the pair — i.e. the LOT set.

Not all Brits do this with Barbados because of the historic treatment of it as a plural, and therefore ‑əʊz like potatoes.

[Type IV accents (Scottish and related) have
• even fewer A vowels — typical values ɪ, ɛ, ʊ
• no distinctive length in the B, C and D part-systems.]

AmE speaker. I'm not sure from your comment if you think we really spell "doughnuts" as "donuts". I would consider "donuts" a nonstandard spelling. It's fairly common, but I think it's just a shortcut used by a person who is deliberately omitting letters that are actually in the word.

Anonymous, I don't know your age, but I wonder if that's a generational thing. I (27, Canadian) consider both spellings to be valid, and although I recognize "doughnut" as the traditional spelling, I tend to favor "donut", which I don't consider a shortcut.

On the other topics, I say Barbados with the "o" pronounced as in "go" (and the "s" as an s sound, not a z). For the region, I say caribBEan for the "Pirates of..." franchise, but caRIBbean for the place (I used to use the stressed-"BE" version for both, but that may have been because as a child I had little reason to use the word other than in the context of the Disneyland ride. I'm not sure when I switched to the steessed-"RIB" pronunciation)

I've certainly never seen doughnuts spelt other than as "donuts" during my, admittedly few and brief, visits to the USA, but nor, more to the point, have I ever seen the word spelt that way on American sites on-line. Moreover, those American chains that have made it to this country - Dunkin' Donuts (alas, now demised over here) and Krispy Kreme - both spell it "Donuts".

Ame speaker here. Adverts/corporate spelling is not "real" spelling. Case in point the doughnut chain is called Dunkin Donuts - instead of a proper spelling, Which would be "Dunking Doughnuts"

Among many other sources, Merriam-Webster:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-it-donut-or-doughnut

The "donut" spelling is over a century old at this point.

When I see "barbeque", I want to pronounce it "bar-BEEK" :)

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We're just back from a holiday in France which included a couple of towns in Burgundy. Before and after we might name a town, but it always took me — momentarily — by surprise when my wife apparently spoke of Bonn.

The first time was a puzzle, until I realised she was speaking of Beaune . On subsequent hearings I twigged more quickly, but the effect never completely disappeared.

My wife's English is near-perfect and her Russian accent is slight. Nobody, least of all me, has difficulty understanding her. And yet she doesn't share my British native-speaker instinct when it comes to processing non-English names.

This set me pondering on what my processes are — when coincidentally my ear was caught by another tricky pronunciation. A Frenchman with a really good pronunciation of English triggered a little shock and momentary failure of communication with a comment ending in the word law— which sounded like the French words l'eau ('the water') or an unusually energetic pronunciation of low (opposite of 'high').

So this is how I think it works:

• Leaving aside digraphs (O+another vowel). British English speakers like me have three sounds which we associate with O-spellings

1 the default 'short' sound LOT
When we see an unfamiliar word with O followed by a couple of consonants — or by a single consonant at the end of a word — this is what we use for a spelling pronunciation.

2 the marked 'long' sound GOAT
When we see an unfamiliar word with word-final O or O followed by a single consonant and a vowel, — and of course, in the digraph oa — this is what we use for a spelling pronunciation.

[Oh yes. There's also the occasional digraph oe.]

3 the sound when O is followed by consonant-R (in accents like mine THOUGHT-NORTH-FORCE)
It's usual to describe R-loss in 'non-rhotic' accents like mine. But it can be useful to see it terms of vowel quality whether or not an R-sound is pronounced. It's the same vowel in store and story. When we see an unfamiliar word spelled with OR, the is what we use for a spelling pronunciation.

These are the three basic O-sounds that I recognise instinctively. So when I use a foreign word in an English sentence I anglicise the O-sound into whichever of the three feels nearest. So, for me Bonn : LOT :: Beaune : GOAT.

Russian doesn't have the same three stressed-O templates. So, for Lena, both Bonn and Beaune are anglicised just as they are russified: into a Russian stressed-o sound or a toned-down version for English ears.

By contrast, a French speaker with a decent pronunciation of English has little trouble processing words with sounds 1 & 2 above — the LOT and GOAT words. For the third sound, they're OK if they know the spelling is or — the FORCE and NORTH words. The problem comes with THOUGHT words of which they know the English spelling.

https://youtu.be/jcXEtKSRI8Y?t=60

Although unless you are actually speaking the language, it can sound frightfully affected to speak of "Wien" instead of "Vienna" or the Donau instead of the Danube....

I was thinking that although in Britain we tend to pronounce -os words with a short o, -oll words (droll, poll - although doll is an exception) tend to be pronounced with a long o....

An important difference is the stress.

The Spanish and Greek-derived words we's been considering end in unstressed ‑os. Droll, poll, roll and the rest are monosyllables and therefore stressed. By contrast atoll, Castrol and the anglicised pronunciation of Aperol have the stress elsewhere than the final ‑ol(l).

I think that there's also a lengthening effect of the L-sound somewhere in the word-histories. My father pronounced words spelled ‑al‑ as AWL — even the Italian town of Amalfi.

With familiar words like doll and stroll our only recourse is to recognise the spelled word and supply the pronunciation. It's the unfamiliar words where rule-of-thumb spelling pronunciation steps in. Foreign place names like Limassol and Sebastopol. International coinages like Interpol. Foreign expressions like Skol!

No doubt AmE has different spelling pronunciations.

I very much doubt whether there can be any English word spelled with -ibb- and pronounced with EEB.

Nor can there be any English word pronounced with EEB and spelled with -ibb-.

There can't be many speakers, if any, who use the same vowel for the first two syllables. In a frequent British pronunciation, the first a is a stressed TRAP vowel but the second is an unstressed little grunt. — often called a 'schwa' sound.

Stressed and unstressed vowels are a big problem for English speakers learning Russian — assuming that they're learning to read as well as speak.

It's not just a problem for English speakers. I once knew a Serbian speaker who was trying to read Russian aloud. The alphabet was no problem and he didn't have too much difficulty understanding the related language. But nobody had marked the letters which represented stressed vowels. So he was lost.

English speakers pronounce Caribbean either with two stressed vowels and two unstressed vowels or with one stressed vowel and three unstressed. The two pronunciations are

1.
• first syllable stressed — pronounced with the TRAP vowel
• second syllable unstressed — pronounced with an unstressed-syllable vowel
• third syllable stressed — pronounced with the FLEECE vowel
• fourth syllable unstressed— pronounced with an unstressed-syllable vowel

2.
• first syllable unstressed — pronounced with an unstressed-syllable vowel
• second syllable stressed — pronounced with a KIT vowel
• third syllable unstressed — pronounced with an unstressed-syllable vowel
• fourth syllable unstressed — pronounced with an unstressed-syllable vowel

Now individuals may have slightly different unstressed vowels.
• Most speakers pronounce the fourth syllable with a schwa (little grunt).
• Speakers with pronunciation [2] may have the same schwa sound for the first syllable, or they may use the TRAP vowel sound without stress.
• Speakers with pronunciation [1] may have an unstressed KIT sound for the second vowel or they may have a schwa sound.