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Would phoneticizing it as “aw” help? American English pronounces “thought” as if you added a t to ‘thaw’
Saying it’s “o” makes it sound like you mean it to be pronounced “oh”
As far as Latin alphabet approximates, I'd say "aw" is pretty perfect. Because I think most accents will pronounce "thought" as if you add a t to "thaw". It's just that what that means in terms of the actual articulation varies a lot.
So, Americans with the cot-caught merger will pronounce it with the "cot" vowel, which is what I was trying to get across. UK/Aus/NZ don't all pronounce it the same as each other, but do for the most part pronounce it with the same vowel as they would use for the word "or". And "thaw", in our non-rhotic accents, is the same as Thor.
So "aw" works either way. Nice find!
Pretty sure "caught" won and "cot" lost in the caught-cot merger. I don't think most Americans would conceive of it as an "o" sound
When I hear an American with the caught/cot merger say "caught", it sounds way more similar to my (unmerged) "cot" than my "caught"
I believe you. I meant more that it "won" conceptually than phonetically. To an American ear it sounds more like "aw" or "ah" than "o".
Oh yeah, maybe. I don't really know how you'd measure that.