My friend Alec is taking the opportunity of being locked down to catch up on some reading he’d been intending to get round to for the last fifty or so years, and has reached D H Lawrence. In “Lost Girls”, chapter 6, he has found the following:
“Of course,” he said – he used the two words very often, and pronounced the second, rather mincingly, to rhyme with sauce: “of course,” said Mr. May, “it’s a disgusting place – disgusting! I never was in a worse, in all the cauce of my travels. …”
Alec comments: “we’re bang in Lawrence country. Mr May is a ‘stranger’ who has been in the US. So go on, why did I never know I was mincing when for my entire life I have rhymed ‘course’ with ‘sauce’. Apart from rhotic accents, who doesn’t?”
My suggested answers are
1) Could rural Derbyshire have still been rhotic in the early 20th century?
2) Might there still have been a difference between /ɔə/ and /ɔː/ as a hang-over from previous rhoticism?
3) Did Lawrence distinguish mourn from morn, and use the mourn vowel in course?
4) Did Lawrence pronounce sauce to rhyme with ‘loss’?
Can anyone provide a definitive answer?