basque/Basque/bask

[Dennis R. Preston]

Lynne,

Please see Charles Boberg's piece on British-American /a/'s (and
attendant attitudinal factors) in the Journal of Language and Social
Psychology (18,1) March 1999 for a very nice review and study of
trans-Atlantic /a/.

dInIs



>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

--
Dennis R. Preston
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Languages
740 Wells Hall A
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
Office - (517) 353-0740
Fax - (517) 432-2736