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

Mark J. Reed wrote:

>
>
> And I don't need to know how you pronounce "grass" to know what you
> mean by it, but I nevertheless find it interesting that you pronounce
> it differently from me.  Hey, I'm human. And thus the YAEPT's.
>
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.

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