Talk:aural

Pronunciation vs. oral

I first learned this word when a teacher of French used it. She pronounced the first syllable /aʊ/ (as in now), which is not a pronunciation we list here. The word seems somewhat useless if it can't be aurally distinguished from oral! See this discussion: [1] Equinox ◑ 18:58, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I pronounce them very distinctly, because not only is my aural closer to /ɑ/, my oral is closer to /o/ (whereas my auditory is approximately /ɔ/), apparently similar to Choster in that stackexchange thread. I think this is also happening in Dictionary.com's audio file for aural, which notably does not have the same vowel as oral even though their transcriptions are identical. I'll see if I can find any other examples of people saying it. - -sche (discuss) 21:28, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

In case there are any wider accent/dialect considerations involved here: the first syllables of aura, oral, orchestra, aurora are all the same for me. Equinox ◑ 21:42, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

I think Herisson in the Stackexchange thread is right that they're "supposed" to be the same in most accents, except accents that resisted the horse-hoarse merger (Scottish, some Southern US and African American, Caribbean, some Indian and Irish). But the need to distinguish the words probably motivates ad-hoc changes, like shifting aural to the /ɑ/ I've encountered or to your French teacher's /aʊ/, which approximately matches how the aur- is pronounced in Latin or many modern European languages. I haven't been able to find evidence of anyone else pronouncing aural with /aʊ/, but I don't doubt it. (In searching, because I tried searching for "owral", I did find a book by Bernard J. Freedman, Just a Word, Doctor (1987), page 33, which does point out how the words sound the same in England but not Scotland.) Scratch that, right before I hit 'post' I found a book, Philip Gooden's 2009 Who's Whose: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily Confused Words, which says aural and oral "are adjectives with a near-identical pronunciation [...] Some speakers distinguish between the two words by pronouncing the first syllable or aural to rhyme with 'ow'." - -sche (discuss) 01:42, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Thinking about this, I realized aural definitely has /ɑ/ for speakers with the cot-caught merger, so that's one thing we could add, even though it doesn't create a distinction for those speakers since they pronounce oral with /ɑ/ too.

I don't think my /ɑ/ in aural is a cot-caught merger, though; it seems to be a limited change like how some speakers have shifted moral-but-not-oral to /ɒ/ or /ɑ/, because I do distinguish caught, thought and auditorium (/ɔ/) from cot, lot and odditorium (/ɑ/). I have a three-way distinction between core (~/o˞/~/oɚ/, like I also have in oral), car (/ɑ/), and, to contrive an example, caw'r (a poetic shortening of cawer, one who caws, with /ɔ(ə)/). I think this ~/o˞/ is the thing stackexchange criticizes Teflpedia for acknowledging but then, like other dictionaries, not transcribing. (Looking at various entries on here, it seems like we often document this pronunciation but attribute it to the horse-hoarse distinction, when in fact it seems to occur in words from both of those lexical sets.)

I poked around for examples of people saying aural and only found one so far: this guy (3x in the first 40 seconds) pronounces aural with the same vowel as is conventionally associated with oral. - -sche (discuss) 23:02, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

The old Century Dictionary and old (1933) OED only have aural as (in Century's notation) âʹra̤l "as in fall, talk, naught" / (in the OED's) ǭ·răl with the same first vowel as audacity, auditory and augur (and horse), /ɔ/. They have a distinction between aural and oral, but it's only by having oral as (in Century') ōʹra̤l with the first vowel "as in note, poke, floor" (a̤ = schwa) / (OED) ōᵊ·răl with the same /o(ə)/ as hoarse. - -sche (discuss) 15:42, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

While looking for something else, I found this post by someone who refers to the pronunciation of orange, forest, Florida etc with /ɑ/ as the "oral-aural merger", as if he thinks oral and aural are supposed to have different vowels, which is not historically the case AFAICT but which does support my sense that the need to distinguish the words leads people to make an ad-hoc change of aural to /ɑ/ (or, as noted above, /aʊ/). I am tempted to add /ɑ/ to the list of "for some speakers, to distinguish" pronunciations (and not just the cot-caught merger pronunciation). - -sche (discuss) 21:59, 30 November 2022 (UTC)