Re: English |a|

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.

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