the good old days, and that pesky letter "shee" (formerly "shch")

[Paul B. Gallagher]

John Dunn wrote:

> I'm sorry, Paul, but I can only conclude that you mis-spent your
> youth watching too many British films of the 1930s.

Your reasoning is sadly deficient; I've only occasionally seen such 
movies and cannot name one at the moment.

As you will know from my other postings, I'm an American, not a Brit, 
and I've lived most of my life in this country, where the /bæk/ 
pronunciation is the standard and /bak/ is completely unheard of. This 
is why I was -- and still am -- astonished to read that any native 
English speaker might even /consider/ such a pronunciation, much less 
adopt it.

I am, of course, familiar with the /a/ usage in a few other words 
("pahss," "cahn't," etc. where we generally have /eə/ instead of /æ/), 
as noted before, but AFAIK "back" has never been in that set until now.

Does "back" in your new RP now rhyme with "clock" and "sock," and do 
"sack" and "sock" sound alike? Or do you maintain the distinction by 
using rounding in "clock," "sock," etc. and not in "back"? (Over here, 
as you may know, we have no rounding in these words: /klak/, /sak/, etc. 
with /a/ as in "father.")

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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