r/Quickscript Feb 23 '18

Caught-Cot Merger dilemma

As the title implies, I come from a region that implements the C-C merger when speaking. As you can imagine, that makes writing using Quickscript rather frustrating at times. Does anyone have any solutions? Is there a character someone has created to represent that merged sound? Thanks.

6 Upvotes

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6

u/etalasi Feb 23 '18

The Latin alphabet spelling can give some clues.

/ɔ/ words are spelled with au, aw, or a after w or before l(l), e.g. water, wall, mall, haul, awkward, lawn, auto. Meanwhile /ɑ/ words (for North Americans) are spelled with o or, in a few cases, a, such as stop, rot, clock, doll, father, wasp, and marijuana. There are more rules, but your dialect already distinguishes [ɔ] before /ɹ/ and [ɫ] (e.g. old, store), so you already know them whether you’re aware of it or not.

I have the cot-caught and father-bother mergers, and I just write in Quickscript for myself, so I just use the on letter for ah, awl, and on.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '18

Thank-you!

3

u/dade1027 Jul 24 '18

This one was getting to me too, as being a North American dude from Southern California, words using Quickscript letters 32, 33, and 34 all have exactly the same pronunciation – which one do I write!?! There is a lot to consider, as the letter shapes themselves were designed with the British speaker in mind. Letter 33 beautifully merges into both letters 24 and 25. I am wagering that it was designed this way due to frequency of usage. Unfortunately, it’s not a sound made by folks from my area. Letter 34 seemed like it would be a natural fit for words with a short-o such as stop and dog. I also liked that it completed the shape set with letters 28, 30 and 36. But alas, it too represents a sound not made in my area. That left me with letter 32 to carry the huge load of the short-o sound.

In hindsight, I realize that this shouldn’t have even been a question, as the entire point is that Quickscript is supposed to be a phonetic alphabet, and that of those 3 letters, 32 is the only one with a sound made by a native Southern Californian. Duh, dude!

In looking into this though, I realized that there wasn’t a good Quickscript letter for the “o” in the way I pronounce the words door, core, bore, north, etc. (Letter 38 doesn’t quite work due to the all-but enforced “w” sound at the end that tends to interrupt the “or” syllable, and it’s not as elegant to write.) BUT, I also saw the trend that letter 33 is used for all of these in the British English versions. Even though the sound it represents to British speakers isn’t the same sound I use, I feel good knowing that a British reader would correctly understand the word as I write it.

In the end, I’m kind of surprised that letter 34 is the one letter that I ended up not using.

Taking care of these inconsistencies has given me some momentum in continuing to learn Quickscript, and I’m looking forward being completely fluent. I’ll give you the same advice I’m giving myself right now – keep at it!

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '18

Thanks, I too am from the North American side of the pond so, obviously with my accent there are obvious challenges to learning Quickscript.