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Re: English |a|

From:Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Saturday, January 15, 2005, 14:54
On 16 Jan 2005, at 1.29 am, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> I have some questions about English "a" sounds. I don't want to start > YAEPT, but I am interested in synchronic as well as diachronic > differences. > > First, how did the word |father| (/faDr=/ modulo dialectical > differences; here I'm using /a/ to represent the bottom of the vowel > chart, > ignoring differences between [a], [A], [6], etc.) avoid being > Great Vowel Shifted into something like /fejDr=/?
I believe it was actually [faD@r] (which you'd spell as /f&Dr=/) during the time of the GVS, so there was no long vowel to shift. My guess has been that it lengthened at the same time as 'rather' did the same, and somehow managed to infiltrate American English too---but I don't know for certain. On the other hand, compare and contrast with 'broad', which also seems to have forgotten about the Great Vowel Shift. _Water_'s another one that seems to have missed the GVS (rather than becoming *waiter, I say \wawter\). Probably more sound changes are like the &>a: before fricatives/nasals of British English, i.e. they happen word-by-word, rather than all at once. ('Great' also missed half its expected shift.)
> Second, is there any rhyme or reason to the Transatlantic differences > between /&/ and /a/? For instance, over here we say /tako/ and > /m@rak@/ > but /b@n&n@/, while in Rightpondia they say /t&ko/ and /m@r&k@/ but > /b@nan@/.
I don't think so. In Oz it's \TAH-ko\, \me-RACK-a\ and \be-NAH-na though, whereas modern local borrowings tend to get what I call /a/ but you'd call either /V/ or /"@/ (short U). (Perhaps \be-NAH-na\ can be explained away by pointing out that RP have/had a lot of /A:n/ where Americans have /&n/, as in plant, dance, Alexander.) I think there's probably a general tendency for each dialect to move [a] to the sound phonemically closer to it, which in British English is /&/ but in American it's /a/ (I suppose)---Australian, of course, just borrowed what it came off of and was influenced by a close relationship with Britain early on and a close relationship with America later on. -- Tristan.

Replies

Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Elyse M. Grasso <emgrasso@...>