LL-L "Phonology" 2003.12.01 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 01.DEC.2003 (04) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Gary Taylor <gary_taylor_98 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language Varieties

Ok all

I've got a language puzzle for you. Yeah it's to do
with Estuary English again, but bear with me.

In my dialect I make a difference between a short and
long 'a' (/æ/ and /æ:/ - not to be confused with the
Standard English a pronunciation of 'bath' which is
also present in my dialect, it's more akin to an
American pronunciation of the a in 'bath'). I've been
trying to work out some of the rules for it but have
come across some complications. It seems partly to do
with the following letter and partly to do with the
word class, so for example any word ending in a
voiceless consonant (p-t-k etc), a fricative (s-z-f
etc) or b will automatically have a short æ (bap
/bæ?p/ - bat /bæ?/ - back /bæ?(k)/ - jazz /dZæz/ - dab
/dæb/).  All words ending in an 'n' or 'm' will have a
long æ (man /mæ:n/ - lamb /læ:m/), words ending in
'ng' though have a short æ (sang - /sæŋ/),
however words ending in 'ngle' have a long æ (tangle -
/tæ:ŋgo/).

It gets more interesting with words ending in d and g.
The following is a list of words - the challenge is
can you work out the rules?? I've been puzzling over
it for a long time, and I'm not sure if the
differences are due to sporadic changes or due to
historical differences, which were never present in
the script. Anyway here's a list for you to puzzle
over:

Short æ
cad, dad, fad, gad, had, nad, pad, tad, plaid, Brad,
Chad, dag, fag, gag, hag, Jag, lag, mag, nag, sag,
tag, wag, shag, brag, blag, flag (verb)

Long æ
bad, lad, mad, sad, bag, rag, flag (noun)

I'd welcome any feedback - the last example in both
lists might give some clues - also noteworthy is that
there are no verbs in the second list, but apart from
that, I'm foxed.

Gary

ps. I'm choosing to call Estuary a dialect and not
just an accent, as Standard English itself is just a
dialect of English which happens to have prestige -
also there are a few words and grammatical features
which don't tie in with standard English - although
not enough to really differentiate it from the
standard. I'll tell you about them some time if you're
at all interested...

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