The use of buck as a verb, which comes from the noun buck that means ‘a male animal,’ also goes back to the cowboy days of the 1800s. We also note that the middle-syllable stress of the Spanish original has been bucked onto the last syllable of the English version. That may explain the reshaping of the first part of vaquero, with the vowel a, to English buck, which is what an unbroken horse often does when a cowboy first tries to ride it. Although Spanish vaquero and English cowboy both refer to the cattle that the workers herded, the men actually rode horses. This happens in words like buckaroo from Spanish vaquero or vindaloo probably from Portuguese vin(ho) d’alho, or even in lasso from Spanish lazo but pronounced /ˈlæsu/ with /u/ in English rather than /ˈlɑso/ as though it were Spanish.Yesterday in an e-mail a friend wrote “Will do, buckaroo.” A Spanish speaker may recognize that the colloquial buckaroo, which entered English in the 1800s, is just an Anglicized version of vaquero ‘cowboy,’ with the b of buckaroo doing a good job in representing the Spanish pronunciation of v. The other kind of reduction we see in words adapted into English from other languages where they had originally ended in /o/ is for them to go to /u/. Notice though how when that gets reduced in the unstressed position, it gets spelled fella, reflecting that it has become an open back unrounded /ɑ/, phonetically reduced further even to schwa. This ends up being reflected in spellings like fellow. Sometimes words spelled with ‹a› are pronounced /ɔ/, as in one regional pronunciation of the stressed syllable in the city of Chicago, or even grandma in the eye-dialect spelling of grandmaw. Normally a word-final tense vowel like phonemic /o/ that isn’t reduced will take a terminal glide phonetically, so an extra /w/ and sometimes written phonetically as.
So words like soft and loft and coughed, or sawyer and lawyer, are more likely than just plain saw and law type words. This is because for the most part, /ɔ/ patterns like a “checked” vowel (meaning a lax vowel like the ones that also prototypically occur in DRESS, KIT, HAM, PUT) in that it doesn’t like to end a syllable without a consonant or glide following it. Common examples are saw, law, claw, draw, flaw, jaw, raw, thaw, or a crow’s caw. (Contrariwise, in American English the phoneme transcribed /ɔ/ may be realized phonetically as something like -even in accents where it is not merged with the open unrounded /ɑ/ sound, it often is relatively close to it phonetically.) This mainly comes up as an issue when people are trying to compare vowel sounds between different languages: for example, comparing English "o" sounds to those of Italian, French, or German. The British English /ɒ/ phoneme ("short o") may be realized as the IPA phonetic vowel, and the British English /ɔː/ phoneme may be realized as the IPA phonetic vowel, but purely phonetic transcriptions are not very commonly encountered, particularly not when discussing restrictions on the distribution of sounds in a language's sound system. This vowel sound does occur word-finally, in various words spelled with -aw ( law, claw, raw, straw), and in "non-rhotic" accents also in words spelled with -oar, -ore such as roar, more, tore, bore (and some words spelled with -oor such as door and floor). It is also transcribed /ɔː/ (with the IPA length marker "ː") in the context of British English to indicate that it functions as a "long vowel" in the British English vowel system. The symbol /ɔ/ is most commonly used in transcriptions of English to represent a vowel sound distinct from the sound of "short o". So I don't think you'll be able to find any word ending in /ɒ/. (Unlike /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, which some accents use in words like read y or grad ual.) In American English, historical "short o" has been merged into the originally "long" vowel sound /ɑ/, so the original restriction on the distribution of the "short o" sound no longer applies, at least not on the surface level (the word spa ends in the same sound /ɑ/ that is used for the "short o" sound in pod, so pod and "spa'd" rhyme).įurthermore, as far as I know there is no dialect of English where the sound /ɒ/ is in common use in fully unstressed open syllables. This is not an absolutely exceptionless rule: interjections may not follow it (for example, I have /æ/ in "yeah" and /ʌ/ in "duh"), and I don't find it particularly difficult to pronounce nonsense words ending in stressed /ɪ/, for example. In general, English words do not end with any of the stressed "short" vowel sounds (/ɒ/, /æ/, /ɛ/, /ʌ/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/).
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