Re: USAGE: YAEPT: Re: Diversity and uniformity AND No rants! (USAGE: di"f"thong) -- responses to Andreas and Ray.

On 6/2/06, Joe <joe@...> wrote:
> Southeastern dialects (and RP) of English tend to have [A:] instead of
> [&] in a variety of odd places, generally before fricatives, but fairly
> arbitrarily.  Hence 'grass', 'bath', 'path', 'laugh' are [grA:s],
> [bA:T], [pA:T] and [lA:f].  It's inconsistent though, and I don't know why.
Yup;  have you read JC Wells' book?  Fascinating stuff.

Incidentally, "Southeastern dialects" is a somewhat ambiguous phrase,
since the English of the Southeastern US is rather different from that
of the Southeastern part of Britain. :)

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

Reply