Re: English |a|

On 16 Jan 2005, at 4.39 am, Herman Miller wrote:

> Tristan McLeay wrote:
>
>> 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.)
>
> The "w" seems to have affected the following "a" in words like water,
> watch, wand, wander, and waffle. These all have /a/ in my version of
> American English, and I believe something like /Q/ in typical British
> dialects (except for "water", which is probably more like /O/). A
> similar effect happened in words like "warm", "warp", "wharf",
> "warble",
> and "Hogwarts" (which have /O/). I used to pronounce "warg" as /wOrg/,
> but I've also heard it as /wArg/, and I don't know which is correct.
I presume by /wArg/ you mean \wahrg\, which I spose to some extent
makes sense---the rounding was prevented by following velar consonants
(wax, wag, wang), and if the /r/ wasn't considered in this process,
then it would've eventually become \wahrg\.

American English seems to have some sort of issue with short O vs AW,
but the orthography (vowel1+single consonant+vowel2=vowel1-is-long) and
British/Aussie pronunciation both seem to indicate a long vowel. If /a/
became /Q/, there's no reason to expect */a:/ wouldn't've become */O:/
if it existed in the right place at the right time.

So to me it looks like 'water' must've been /wa:t@r/ at some stage.

--
Tristan.

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