Re: English |a|

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.

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