Like croissant, like quiche, focaccia and ciabatta

[Chris F. Waigl]

Now it's my turn to lament lost posts -- I never saw any followups to my
Bratwurst post.

On Mon, 2006-09-18 at 17:17 -0400, Mark A. Mandel wrote:

> Chris F Waigl reported
> > Bratwurst is pronounced with a short A (rhymes with "lot").

Certainly not. I mean, I certainly didn't report this. For me, "lot" has
an "o" sound. Rounded. Many American English speakers don't have the
sound at all. Its closest neighbour (but, needless to say, a different
vowel) would be the one in "door".

And whoever wrote this -- in which language does "Bratwurst" have a
"short a"? Is there a fixed pronunciation of this borrowing in English?

In German, it has a sound close to cardinal vowel 4, which is typically
absent in English. Low, front, undrounded. And it's long, at least in
the South.

> I lamented:
> > Whatever happened to "short A" as [ae], the vowel of The
> > Cat in the Hat?
>
> [And looking at what I dictated, I would've changed "whatever" to "what
> ever" if I had noticed it.*]
>
> Ben Zimmer points out:
>     >>>>>
>
> Note that the source Chris quoted was from Wisconsin, where "brat"
> takes the "cot" vowel, not the "cat" vowel (shifted according to NCVS,
> of course).
>
>  <<<<<
>
> That's as may be, but I wasn't lamenting the Northern Cities Vowel Shift,
> but the use of "short A" as a name for the low back unrounded vowel
> phoneme of English rather than the low front vowel.

Chris Waigl

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