Talk:Florida

Pronunciation

Re diff, diff: I think there may be more of a notation misunderstanding / shortcoming at work here than a difference in pronunciation. Some dictionaries conventionally notate the vowel most people use in Florida and floor via the same symbol they use for flaw, even though they're not the same sound, because they're systematically not the same, so some dictionaries expect people to just know that the vowels in /ɔɹ/ vs /ɔ/ differ. I was going to say Merriam-Webster does this, as floor, hoarse, horse, etc are notated "ȯr" and flaw, haw, etc are "ȯ" even though the vowels in the audio files systematically and markedly differ between the -r vs. r-less words, but actually, their pronunciation key clarifies that while their "ȯ"-by-itself corresponds to IPA /ɔ/, their "ȯr", as seen in Florida, corresponds to IPA /oɚ/~/ɔɚ/. I'd love if we could systematically use a more accurate symbol like /o/~/oʊ/ for these words, rather than certain dictionaries' "/ɔɹ/ but expect people to know it's not /ɔ/" contrivance.
A complicating factor is the former horse-hoarse distinction, where only the hoarse set had /oɹ/~/oʊɹ/ and horse is conventionally notated as /ɔɹ/; we should ideally retain a {{a|hoarse-horse distinction}} pronunciation for horse words, but even there it'd be helpful to look for a more accurate symbol than the traditional /ɔ/ IMO, since AFAICT the vowel of horse was/is different from the vowel of haw or hawer, and indeed the 1933 OED makes a three-way distinction in all words I checked between the horse set (hǭɹs, with italics), the hoarse set (hōᵊɹs), and the haw set (hǭ, no italics; their pronunciation guide affirms that "ǭ" and "ǭ" indicate distinct vowels). - -sche (discuss) 06:15, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

That makes sense to me. I've always wondered if syllable boundaries matter .... in my dialect (and possibly Tharthan's since we're close to each other) the word floor is pronounced identically to the first four letters of Florida. Traditionally this is spelled as IPA^(key): /flɔɹ/ in IPA. But some people here also pronounce Florida such that the first three letters are pronounced the same as the whole word flaw, which is traditionally spelt IPA^(key): flɔ in IPA.

This is a very audible distinction, despite the two vowels sharing the same IPA symbol. I wonder if subconsciously it is just the syllable boundary that's changing, as some people segment it as FLƆR-id-a and others as FLƆ-ri-da, even within the same dialect. It's just a hunch. So far as I know, there is no dialect of AmEng where floor is pronounced IPA^(key): [flɔɹ] with the literal ɔ vowel. That's why I don't think it's a traditional dialect boundary.

Anyway, it's perhaps best resolved by using the square brackets even if it disagrees with the traditional IPA spelling. Thoughts? —Soap— 20:28, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

I think that you raise a very good point about syllable boundaries, Soap.

I support the inclusion of some narrow transcriptions following GA /ˈflɔɹ.ɪ.də/ for [ˈfloɹ-] pronunciations, as well as including [ˈflɔ.ɹɪ.də] somewhere. And to -sche's point, I agree that we ought to see how we might best be able to indicate to the average person consulting Wiktionary that it mustn't be assumed that /ɔɹ/ is precisely [ɔɹ].

Perhaps an additional footnote in Appendix:English_pronunciation would be of some value. Tharthan (talk) 06:53, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

@Soap: just to check, do the speakers you mention who pronounce Florida with a flaw vowel different from the floor vowel pronounce e.g. rah! the same as raw? Because some people pronounce flaw /flɑ/ (and Florida /ˈflɑɹɪdə/, a pronunciation we currently attach various geographic labels to although I've questioned in past discussions whether it's just a {{a|cot-caught}} or nonregional alternative pronunciation), and their flaw sounds different from floor regardless of whether their floor is /floɹ/ or /flɔɹ/. (Weirdly, /flɑ/ is even the only pronunciation Cambridge lists for the US.)
@both: In general, I think the hoarse-horse merger to /o/~/o̞/ is so much the norm that we should discuss switching all these words' {{a|GenAm}} pronunciations from /ɔ/ to something like MW's IPA /o/, or at least adding /o/, since the best way to prevent people from assuming we mean /ɔ/ when we write /ɔ/ in these words is to... write the right sound instead. (Since there's a difference in the vowel itself, merely changing the syllable boundary doesn't address the problem IMO.) This probably needs to be a broader decision (since we should handle this categorically, affecting a lot of entries), so I'll start a BP thread in a moment. - -sche (discuss) 19:36, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

No, the vowel in raw is definitely [ɔ] , not [ɑ], but I can only speak for New England, and I've traveled very little outside my home region, so I honestly dont know what patterns there might be in the rest of the country. General American is a much larger population and may have something completely different going on. —Soap— 22:27, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Another New Englander chiming in here (albeit one who got transplanted to Minnesota a few years back); for me, floor is homophonous with the first syllable of Florida and both use /oɹ/, whereas the /ɔ/ found in flaw and the /ɑ/ vowel of rah are whole different animals. (In case it matters: full horse/hoarse merger; full cot/caught merger; full father/bother merger except before /ɹ/ plus a handful of other scattered exceptions which remain unmerged.) Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes} 01:10, 14 November 2022 (UTC)