Re: USAGE: indefinite "a" before vowel-initial words

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 10:21:49AM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> The use of /@/ and /D@/ as invariant articles is a marker for
> AAVE, a language variety that no American can avoid being affected
> by to some degree.  One day I was explaining the /D@/ ~ /Di/ variation
> to a group of people (it's much less known that /@/ ~ /@n/, not being
> reflected in the orthography) and promptly violated the constraint
> myself in the course of the explanation!
I'm very consistent phonetically - if the article is followed by a
vowel, it's [@n]/[Di], if a consonant [@]/[D@].  The tricky bit is
that "consonant" includes the glottal stop that every once in a while
creeps in before initial vowels.  So while most of the time I say
"the only" as [DijoUnli], every once in a while it ocmes out as
[D@?oUnli].

-Mark