Re: The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 13:47:47 +0000, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>> >
>> > >[...] I think there was no real phoneme *a in PIE
>> >
>> > Think all you want. It's incorrect. Not only is the lack of *a in
>> > a vowel system completely unattested in all known languages
>> > (at least human ones), you simply cannot wave away such a
>> > common root as *kap- "grasp, hold, have". It is far too secure to
>> > ignore.
>>
>> English. What used to be, and still is written as <-a-> is now an
>> ablaut series |eI, ä, &|. All occurrences of proper /a/ in English
>> are loans (eg. <spa>).
>
>And where does <father> come from?

Apparently that's unclear. Unlike other words with /A/ in British English
(calm, halve, dance, grant, chance, staff, class, bath, last etc.), which
have /æ/ in American English, <father> has /A/ in America too.

>In Received Pronunciation you also have such native words as <far>
>and <fast>.

American English only has /A/ in "father" and before -r(C), otherwise it
has /æ/, but this is more than compensated by the unrounding of /A"/ (the
vowel of "rod" etc.) > /A/ (in some American varieties also /O/ ("law") >
/A/).

/a/ is of course also present in the diphthongs /aI/ and /aU/.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...