At 7:27:10 PM on Wednesday, February 20, 2008, Patrick Ryan
wrote:
> Jouppe, you are confusing me.
> Sorry to be dogmatic, but the tongue is in the central
> position of the mouth when [a] in father is pronounced or
> it is not.
For a particular speaker. I've heard native speakers of
U.S. varieties who use a front [a] in <father>, and others
who use a back [A], though the most common realization of
/a/ is neither front nor back. (I don't like to use
'central' in this context, since I usually use it to mean
'not front, not back, not high, and not low'.)
There's certainly no reason that /a/ can't be a back vowel:
OE /a/ seems to have been a back vowel, for instance, the
low front vowel being /æ/.
Brian