basque/Basque/bask

[Lynne Murphy]

The British pronounce 'basque' (a word they seem to use a lot more than
Americans do) so that it sounds like 'bask'.  (They may very well pronounce
the language/people name 'Basque' the same way, but we have an American
Basque scholar here, so locally we have a back-vowel in Basque.)

Now, I thought this was just another instance of the British doing weird
things with 'a' in foreign words (e.g., they say the first vowel in salsa,
taco, and fajita as /ae/), but I've just noticed that my AHD4 says that
'bask' and 'basque' and 'Basque' are all pronounced the same (with /ae/).
Is that right, or is AHD a bit loopy here?

Lynne


Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320