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

[John Dunn]

Ancient British Television Joke, circa 1965 (on the subject of non-rounded vowels):

Two passengers in an aeroplane;
American passenger: Say, what do you do for a living?
British passenger: I'm a clerk [cla:k].
AP: No, be serious.
BP: I am being serious.
AP: All right, you're a clock [clak], you go tick-tock, tick-tock.

The position can be summed up as follows:
sack is [sak] (for most speakers nowadays)
sock is [sok], i.e. higher and with rounding
pass is either [pass] or [pa:ss], depending on whether you come from north or south of the isogloss I mentioned in the off-list message (which runs across the middle of England)
can't is [ca:nt] for most speakers in England, but [cant] occurs in some varieties.

There have been some significant shifts in standard British English pronunciation[s] over the last 50 years, due at least in part to social and geographical mobility.  The [a] in [sack] always existed in many varieties (including my own) and may even have predominated among non-RP speakers; the shift from [æ] to [a] in such words is, I suspect, helped by the fact that the rounded vowel in sock leaves a gap; it also allows for a clearer distinction between pairs such as sacks and sex (on which topic there is an even worse joke, but I will spare you that one).

John Dunn.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Paul B. Gallagher" <paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:39:19 -0400
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] the good old days, and that pesky letter "shee" (formerly "shch")

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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John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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