8.1173, Disc: British <a>

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-8-1173. Tue Aug 12 1997. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 8.1173, Disc: British <a>

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1)
Date:           Tue, 12 Aug 1997 10:02:42 SAST-2
From:  "Lass, RG, Roger, Prof" <ROGER at beattie.uct.ac.za>
Subject:        British <a>

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:           Tue, 12 Aug 1997 10:02:42 SAST-2
From:  "Lass, RG, Roger, Prof" <ROGER at beattie.uct.ac.za>
Subject:        British <a>

Having followed the discussion of [ae] vs. [a:], etc. in S British
English, I'd like to add a few historical points that may help to
straighten out some uncertainties.

1. ME /a/ remained open [a] in S England until about the middle of the
17th century (the first good witness to [ae] is John Wallis' Grammar
of 1653). At this stage there was no lengthening or change of quality.

2. The new [ae] began to lengthen before /r/ in the later 17th century
(categorically), and then before voiceless fricatives except [S], and
variably before /NC/ clusters. The first traces of the lengthening
(well described in Christopher Cooper's Grammatica linguae Anglicanae,
1685) show lengthening as variable, more frequent if a consonant
follows the consonant causing lengthening: thus short vowel in car,
long in cart, short in pass, long in passed, etc.

3. Lengthening increases during the 17th-early 18th century, and by
around the 1740s (e.g. in Mather Flint's Prononciation de la language
Angloise, 1740) there is variable lowering of the lengthened [ae:] to
[a:], partly lexically determined. This continues throughout the 18th
c.

4. The situation--which words have lengthened and/or lowered vowels--
continues to be fluid well into the 19th c. A J Ellis in 1874 reports
both the modern pattern and a whole set of variants, including short
vowels even before /r/.

5. The retraction to a low central or back(ish) vowel is late,
probably not before the later 1870s.

6. The process never diffused through the whole lexicon except before
/r/ (which of course was later lost); there are still loads of minimal
or near-minimal pairs in RP and other southern varieties, e.g.
ass/arse, cant/can't, mass/mask, etc. A lot of forms vacillate, e.g.
short or long in masturbate, plastic, etc. (See John Wells' Accents of
English, 1982 for a good account).

Roger Lass









Roger Lass
Department of Linguistics
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch 7700/South Africa
Tel +(021) 650 3138  Fax +(021) 650 3726




















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