{"id":1352,"date":"2022-06-26T01:28:02","date_gmt":"2022-06-26T01:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2022-06-26T01:28:14","modified_gmt":"2022-06-26T01:28:14","slug":"o-truncated-compounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/o-truncated-compounds\/","title":{"rendered":"O in truncated compounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>English uses <em>stump compounds<\/em> formed by taking (roughly) the first syllable of two (or three) words and adjoining them. This is the presumably the process behind real-estate neologisms like <em>Soho <\/em>(&lt; South of Houston) and <em>Noho<\/em>\u00a0(&lt; North of Houston), truncated brand names like <em>HoJo<\/em> (&lt; Howard Johnson, a hotel chain), and nicknames for celebrities like <em>BoJo<\/em> (&lt; Beau Johnson) and <em>FloJo<\/em> (&lt; Florence Griffith Joyner). One strange property of these compounds\u2014documented in an unpublished paper I presented with Laurel MacKenzie at an LSA meeting many years ago\u2014is that when such compounds contain an orthographic &lt;o&gt;, it is almost always pronounced with the GOAT vowel (e.g., American English [o\u028a]) even when that is unfaithful to the underlying pronunciation. Thus <em>Soho<\/em> is [\u02c8so\u028a.ho\u028a], not the more faithful [\u02c8sa\u028a.ha\u028a]. And, the second syllable of <em>Samohi<\/em>, a stump compound for Santa Monica High School, is presumably read [&#8230;mo\u028a&#8230;] even though it stands in for [\u02c8m\u0251.n\u026a.k\u0259].<\/p>\n<p>(h\/t: Laurel, of course.)<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1353\" src=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/samohi-150x300.jpeg\" alt=\"banner reading &quot;Samohi&quot;\" width=\"150\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/samohi-150x300.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/samohi.jpeg 468w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 85vw, 150px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>English uses stump compounds formed by taking (roughly) the first syllable of two (or three) words and adjoining them. This is the presumably the process behind real-estate neologisms like Soho (&lt; South of Houston) and Noho\u00a0(&lt; North of Houston), truncated brand names like HoJo (&lt; Howard Johnson, a hotel chain), and nicknames for celebrities like &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/o-truncated-compounds\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;O in truncated compounds&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-phonology","category-sociolinguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1355,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions\/1355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}