Most common sound for words ending in letter "a"

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Larry's comments reminded me of something I wanted to check with the list about. I have /a/ in "bla(h), bla(h), bla(h)" but I have a colleague who uses /æ/ (as in BAT) here. She's from Baltimore, but I don't know that it's a regional thing. Are there others who use /æ/ in "bla(h)"? 


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Laurence Horn
Sent: Tue 2/10/2009 1:38 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: Most common sound for words ending in letter "a"
 
The generalization is not quite accurate as it
stands, either, however profound it may or may
not be.  Besides "ma", "pa" and other
monosyllabic exceptions to the generalization,
there would be instances of stressed final
syllables; "mama" and "papa" end in schwa if they
have penult stress, but /a/ if they're stressed
finally (more common with "papa", I'd think). I
pronounce "dada" with two /a/ vowels if I'm
referring to the art movement and ditto "tata"
('goodbye') and "caca" ('poop').  (Maybe there's
a subregularity affecting words derived from
baby-talk, where reduplication is more of a
factor than least-effort vowel reduction?*) In
any case, the mapping between orthographic final
a and schwa...oops, ~u/uh wouldn't be 100% of
polysyllables in a somewhat larger database.  Bla
bla bla.

LH, thinking that one application of
investigating such correlations would be building
a text-reader for the blind, or the lazy.

*and it extends to other cases of reduplication;
the Wawa chain of convenience stores in the
Northeast is regularly pronounced /'wa "wa/, not
/'wa w@/, where " indicates secondary stress.

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