Re: PIE *a -- a preliminary checklist

There still is a continuum among dialects regarding
these sounds
The <e> of clerk, university, etc. comes out as /@, a,
ey/ depending on the dialect
My older relatives in Appalachia still pronounce
<-er-> as /@r/ e.g. cherry /c^@Ri/, there /D@.../


--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

. . .

>
> You've never come across a sporadic change?
> Neogrammarian regularity is
> a useful idealisation, indispensable as a heuristic,
> but hardly
> realistic. There are untidy "facts of life" like,
> for example, the
> unpredictable development of Middle English /x/
> after back vowels (it
> was sometimes lost, lengthening the vowel, and
> sometimes changed into
> /f/), or the a-colouring of Middle English /e/
> before /r/ (we have
> <star, heart, start, yard, barn>, but <earth,
> earnest, herd, birch>).
>

. . .


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