What Sound Does Short o Make?
We have been giving a number of mini-workshops on the new Lonely Vowels books that came out last fall – with some interesting results. Almost every workshop so far has raised some spirited discussion about the sound that short o makes (i.e., the vowel sound in pot, top, on and sock.) There have been essentially two issues raised. The first issue is the way in which we chose to represent the short o sound in print. This point is not extremely important, but it is worth some clarification. The second issue is the different way in which people pronounce vowels. That issue has more important ramifications for teaching reading. Regarding the first point, in The Lonely Vowels Teachers Manual we introduced Lonely o (short o) like this: He says /aw/. [Pronounce this like the o in hot]. There are several common technical symbol sets for representing different phonemes, including the dictionary pronunciation key, the International Phonetic Alphabet and the Unicode of diacritical marks. We chose
