At 1:46:55 AM on Thursday, May 15, 2008, fournet.arnaud
wrote:
[...]
> What about the word father ?
> Is the <a> not long in all varieties of Modern English ?
This is a very complicated matter, actually. In my
experience phonemic analyses of standard U.S. varieties
don't recognize vowel length as a phonemic feature; analyses
of RP and related varieties, on the other hand, do. In
Scottish Standard English (SSE) vowel length is not
phonemic, though there is a conditioned length distinction.
The <a> vowel in <father> would typically be analyzed as /a/
in common U.S. varieties, /A:/ in RP and similar, and /a/ in
SSE.
> Sounds to me as being neither pot nor cat.
In RP the three are distinct: /A:/ in <father>, /A./ in
<pot>, and /æ/ in <cat>. (In case you're not familiar with
the ASCII IPA symbols, /A/ is script-a, and /A./ is
turned-script-a.) Almost all U.S. speakers have the same
vowel in <father> and <pot> (the father-bother merger),
notated /a/ and typically low central, contrasting with /æ/
in <cat>; in SSE the vowels of <father> and <cat> have
merged as /a/ (generally realized, I believe, as [a]), while
<pot> has merged with <caught> as /O/.
Brian