`bast'

[Sheila Watts]

>On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>> >According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP.

>Interesting and curious.  Both my Collins dictionary and John Wells's
>Longman Pronouncing Dictionary recognize the pronunciation with /-st/ as
>the only possibility for RP, though Collins notes that `bass', so
>spelled and so pronounced, is a variant of `bast'.

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear here (the first snip was a quotation by
Rick McAllister from a mail of mine). I wasn't referring to the presence or
absence of the t in the pronunication, but to the character of the vowel.
In RP, there are two possible pronunciation of the vowel spelt <a> in words
of this type (and elsewhere, but let's not spread this net too wide), one
more raised and fronted than the other. The pronunciation difference is
noted in Alan Ross's essay on 'U and Non-U' where he refers to whether
people pronouce 'mass to rhyme with pass instead of gas'. All three rhyme
for me, and for many years I believed that this reference was a rather
jokey thing connected solely with people so upper-class that they had died
out. But not so! Now that I live in Britain I find that most people here do
not allow, say 'gassed' and 'past' to be a rhyme, as they have different
vowels. I find by asking such speakers that they have no way of knowing
which group new vocabulary items belong to, so my native-speaker informants
can't tell me about bast, as for most of them it is an unknown vocabulary
item. What Chambers' source is, I don't know.

By the way, in Ireland too we say 'spool of thread', whereas here they say
'reel of cotton' - cotton, in Ireland, is the raw material or the fabric,
not the stuff you sew with.

Best wishes,
Sheila Watts
_______________________________________________________
Dr Sheila Watts
Newnham College
Cambridge CB3 9DF
United Kingdom

phone +44 1223 335816