representative words partitioning UK/US english vowel variation:
bath choice cloth cure dress face fleece foot force goat goose kit lot mouth near north nurse palm price square start strut thought trap
Lambek's "From word to sentence" notes (pp.79-80) the difficulty of shoehorning languages which use parallel constructions (resp. the mathematician's respectively) to place objects and modifiers, not in a nested order, but in parallel sequence (resp. not order-inverting). Maybe linguists need an equivalent of the zip function?