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Not that the participants on that message board used that term, because none of them had the requisite background to use terms like that. They understood it was a dialectical thing and that some people could distinguish the relevant phonemes while others couldn't, but those without the merger had no way to explain the distinction to those with it. (And for your edification, the two sounds are formed very similarly, but the aw in dawn has rounded lips.)
When I was little, I had speech therapy. The first year I had a teacher who really knew her stuff and showed me diagrams of how to position my tongue and lips and all to make specific sounds. I remember sitting in that stuffy little room on the sixth floor of a building that really only had five floors (and one little room halfway between the top floor and the roof) pondering the fact that you couldn't make a short e before a nasal. (I didn't know other people could or did!)
All the other years were mostly wasted. Straight-forward, explicit teaching was what I needed. But even just the idea that you could take the sounds in words and tell other people in clear language how to make them was revolutionary to me!
We keep trying to hone in on where on earth Eva's spelling issues come from. Recently I realized that she doesn't consistently hear a distinction between s, sh, and ch. Well, I'm pretty sure she can hear the difference between sue and chew, but if you throw shoe into the mix she's bound to get confused, especially if the words really are lease, leash, and leech. Once I realized that, I realized that she often (not always, but often) makes all those sounds with some sort of indeterminate mumble. And then when she spells she never knows which letters are possible! Well, it's a fixable problem, even if its hard to get the school to provide actual speech therapy. Luckily, I do know you can find a clear way to describe every single phoneme, even the impossible sounding ones.
When I was little, I had speech therapy. The first year I had a teacher who really knew her stuff and showed me diagrams of how to position my tongue and lips and all to make specific sounds. I remember sitting in that stuffy little room on the sixth floor of a building that really only had five floors (and one little room halfway between the top floor and the roof) pondering the fact that you couldn't make a short e before a nasal. (I didn't know other people could or did!)
All the other years were mostly wasted. Straight-forward, explicit teaching was what I needed. But even just the idea that you could take the sounds in words and tell other people in clear language how to make them was revolutionary to me!
We keep trying to hone in on where on earth Eva's spelling issues come from. Recently I realized that she doesn't consistently hear a distinction between s, sh, and ch. Well, I'm pretty sure she can hear the difference between sue and chew, but if you throw shoe into the mix she's bound to get confused, especially if the words really are lease, leash, and leech. Once I realized that, I realized that she often (not always, but often) makes all those sounds with some sort of indeterminate mumble. And then when she spells she never knows which letters are possible! Well, it's a fixable problem, even if its hard to get the school to provide actual speech therapy. Luckily, I do know you can find a clear way to describe every single phoneme, even the impossible sounding ones.
