Re[2]: ka and k^a [was: [tied] *kW- "?"]

At 6:48:06 PM on Thursday, September 22, 2005, tgpedersen
wrote:

> But no one claimed the foreignness of PIE *a was a priori.
> It's a contingent fact, derived from the absence of native
> PIE *a (other than in the context -ka-, -h2a- etc) after
> pre-PIE *a -> {/e/, /o/, zero}. And apart from loans and a
> few native words, English has a vowel system without it.

Whose English? In General American it's one of the more
common phonemes, though it's very often spelled <o>; it more
or less combines RP /A:/ and /A./. In Scottish Standard
English it's also common, combining RP /A:/ and /æ/.

Brian