accents with the merger, horse and hoarse are pronounced , but in accents without the merger, hoarse is pronounced with a higher vowel, usually in rhotic and in non-rhotic accents. Accents that have resisted the merger include most Scottish, Caribbean, and older Southern American accents as well as some African American, modern Southern American, Indian, Irish, and older Maine accents. Some American speakers retain the original length distinction (with being pronounced with a vowel that is as short as in Received Pronunciation) but merge the quality. Therefore, hoarse is pronounced longer than horse . The distinction was once present in the speech of southern England, the NORTH vowel being sounded as and the FORCE vowel as the centring diphthong ; for many speakers, however, as noted by Henry Sweet, this contrast had by 1890 become constricted to word-final positions in which the following word did not begin with a vowel ('horse' and 'hoarse' had thus become homophonous, as did 'aurochs' and 'oar ox' but not 'morceau' and 'more so'). In his 1918 Outline of English Phonetics, Daniel Jones describes the distinction as optional, but he still considers it to be frequently heard in 1962; the two vowels are differentiated in the first (1884–1928) and second (1989) editions of the Oxford English Dictionary with the caveat that in most varieties of southern British pronunciation the two have become identical; no distinction is drawn in the third edition, as well as in most modern British dictionaries (Chambers being a notable exception). According to John C. Wells, the distinction is by now obsolete in RP. In British English dialectology, prevocalic in accents that distinguish cot and caught is analyzed as + , not since the non-rhotic dialects that have maintained the distinction feature two vowels corresponding to historic before intervocalic : and –, both of which contrast with . If is considered to be the contemporary reflex of , the merger is incomplete in the intervocalic position (at least in Received Pronunciation) and so moral and oral do not rhyme: (warring, however, was once and is because it is derived from war ). Before the loss of rhoticity, moral and war had the same stressed vowel , and the latter was lengthened and raised and so merged with : , which gave rise to the three-way distinction between prevocalic , and as in moral, warring, and oral (excluding the marginal , which is