Wheel of Fortune: Ebonics is "wrong"

[I just posted this on Wheel of Fortune's contact page.]

On yesterday's show one puzzle included the word "embroidered." An African American woman solved the puzzle but pronounced this word so that it sounded like "emroided."  I believe that this happened because her underlying dialect (African American English) doesn't allow [r] before a consonant.  Pat Sajak (or the judges?) ruled it a "wrong pronunciation."  I believe this was a very serious error, not only in that the couple missed getting the round but also that a legitimate variety of English was dismissed as "wrong."  Her rendering was approximately [ɪmˡbrɔɪdəd].

I wonder whether someone from Boston, who might have pronounced it similarly, would also have been declared "wrong."

ОМГ!

The Atlantic has an online article about Russian nutball Vladimir Zhirinovsky wanting to get rid of "the letter ы" because it sounds "nasty" and "only animals make this sound."  Zhirinovsky is reported to have said that the "primitive, Asiatic sound is the reason people don't like us in Europe."

The sound in question, represented by the letter ы in the Cyrillic alphabet, is a high mid/back unrounded vowel, [ɨ] or possibly [ɯ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet.  Zhirinovsky is correct that this sound occurs in any number of Asian languages, including Korean and Japanese; it also occurs in some Native American languages, such as Aymara (Bolivia/Perú), Yanomama (Brazil/Venezuela), and Garifuna (Central America).  He's probably not correct that animals can make it, since it involves raising the back of the tongue toward the soft palate in a way that it is pretty unique to humans.

The problem with getting rid of "the letter ы" is that this letter represents a phoneme in Russian that is distinct from the phoneme represented by the letter и, which is a high front unrounded vowel. The two sounds in question belong to separate phonemes in Russian because they can be found in minimal pairs, the first of which Zhirinovsky himself offers:

мишка    /miška/       'bear'           мышка    /mɨška/        'mouse'
бить        /bit'/           'to beat'        быть        /bɨt'/         'to be'

Because these two vowels are contrastive, asking Russians to ditch one of them would be like asking English speakers to stop using the vowel [ɪ] (as in bit) and just use the vowel [i] (as in beat) in its place.  This is the sort of thing that can happen over generations of natural language change, but it's simply not the sort of thing you can do by command from on high. 

Jeopardy does it again

Tonight one of the categories on Jeopardy is "rhymes with bot."  Presumably, "bot" would be pronounced [bɑt].  In one of the questions, the desired response was "ought."  Problem is, for some of us, "bot" and "ought" do not rhyme.  For some of us, including me, "ought" is pronounced [ɔt], not [ɑt].  For those not familiar with phonetic symbols, [ɑ] is a low back unrounded vowel, and [ɔ] is a mid back lax rounded vowel.

So, once again, the Jeopardy answer is contingent on whether people have participated in the [ɑ] - [ɔ] merger.

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PS:  I wrote about a similar incident on Jeopardy back in February, that time involving the so-called "homophones" Don and dawn.