(Redirected from Broad A)
Trap-bath split
The 'trap-bath split' is a
vowel split that occurs mainly in southern varieties of
English English (including
Received Pronunciation), in the
Boston accent, and in the Southern Hemisphere accents (
Australian English,
New Zealand English,
South African English), by which the
Early Modern English phoneme was lengthened in certain environments and ultimately merged with the long of ''father''. (Wells 1982: 100–1, 134, 232–33)
In this context, the lengthened vowel in words such as ''bath'', ''laugh'', ''grass'', ''chance'' in accents affected by the split is referred to as a 'broad A' (also, in Britain, 'long A'). Phonetically the vowel is a long back in
Received Pronunciation (RP); it is a fronter vowel, or , in some other accents, including many
Australian and
New Zealand accents, and it may be a rounded in
South African English.
In accents unaffected by the split, these words usually have the same vowel as words like ''cat'', ''trap'', ''man'', the 'short A' or 'flat A'.
The sound change probably occurred during the late
eighteenth century in southern England, and changed the sound of to in words in which the former sound appeared before , leading to RP for ''path'' and for ''sample'', etc. The sound change did not occur before other consonants; thus accents affected by the split preserve in words like ''cat''. See the
Variations section below for more details on the words affected.
British Isles accents
The presence or absence of this split is one of the most noticeable differences between different accents of
English English. An
isogloss runs across the
Midlands from the
Wash to the
Welsh border, passing to the south of the cities of
Birmingham and
Leicester. North of the isogloss, the vowel in most of the affected words is usually the same short as in ''cat''; south of the isogloss, the vowel in the affected words is generally long. (Gupta 2005)
There is some variation close to the isogloss; for example in the dialect of Birmingham (the so-called "
Brummie") most of the affected words have a short , but ''aunt'' usually has a long vowel. Additionally, some words which have in most forms of
American English, including ''half, calf, rather'' and ''can't'', are often found with long vowels in northern England.
In some
West Country accents of
English English where the vowel in ''trap'' is realized as rather than , the vowel in the ''bath'' words was lengthened to and did not merge with the of ''father''. In those accents, ''trap'', ''bath'' and ''father'' all have distinct vowels , and . (Wells 1982: 346–47).
In some other West Country accents, and in many forms of
Scottish English, there is no distinction corresponding to the RP distinction between and .
Southern Hemisphere accents
Evidence for the date of the shift comes from the Southern Hemisphere accents, those of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
In
Australian English, there is generally agreement with southern British in words like ''path, laugh, class''. But before N+consonant, as in ''dance, plant'', most Australians use a flat A (''aunt'' and ''can't'' are exceptions and are invariably pronounced with ). Phonetically the broad A is . In Australia there is variation in the word ''castle'', both pronunciations are commonly heard. For more information, see the table at
Australian English phonology.
A unique exception to this rule is the
South Australian accent, which invariably uses the broad A. Likewise, South African and New Zealand accents have a similar distribution of sounds to RP.
North American accents
Most accents of
American English and
Canadian English are unaffected by the split. The main exceptions are parts of
New England (''see
Boston accent''), where the broad sound can be used in some of the same words as in southern England, such as ''can't, aunt, ask, bath'' etc.
A related, but distinct, phenomenon is the phonemic
æ-tensing in the accents of
New York and
Philadelphia.
Variations
The change did not happen in all eligible words. It is hard to find a clear reason why some changed and others did not. Roughly, the more common a word the more likely that the change from flat to broad took place. It also looks as if monosyllables were more likely to change than polysyllables. Here are some examples from RP, to illustrate the variety:
★ Broad in ''half, calf, laugh, laughter, shaft, raft, after''
★ Flat still in ''baffle, raffle, Taffy, Aphrodite, kaftan''
★ Broad in ''path, bath''
★ Flat in ''mathematics, maths, Cathy''
★ Broad in ''class, pass, mast, past, master, plaster, castle, mask, task''
★ Flat in ''ass (donkey), crass, mass (amount), classic, pastel, asp, Aston, Asquith''
★ Broad in ''aunt, plant, can't, advantage''
★ Flat in ''ant, banter, cant (slang), scant, mantle''
★ Broad in ''dance, chance, advance, answer''
★ Flat in ''ransom, cancer, Anson''
There are some words in which both pronunciations are heard among southern speakers:
★ Greek elements as in ''telegraph, blastocyst, chloroplast''
★ the prefix ''trans-''
★ the words ''mass'' (church service), ''chaff'', ''lather''
Use of broad A in ''mass'' is distinctly conservative and probably rare now. The other fluctuations are both common, but with further complications. While ''graph, telegraph, photograph'' can have either, ''graphic, graphology'' always have flat A. The broad A is more likely when the ''s'' is voiceless (thus ''transfer'' , ''transport'' ) than when it is voiced (thus ''translate'' , ''trans-Atlantic'' ).
Bad-lad split
The 'bad-lad split' is a
phonemic split of the Early Modern English short
vowel phoneme into a short and a long . This split is found in some varieties of
English English and
Australian English in which ''bad'' (with long ) and ''lad'' (with short ) do not rhyme. (Wells 1982: 288–89, 596; Horvath and Horvath 2001; Leitner 2004).
The phoneme is usually lengthened to when it comes before an or , within the same syllable. It is furthermore lengthened in the adjectives ''bad'', ''sad'', ''glad'' and ''mad''; ''family'' also always has a long vowel, regardless of whether it is pronounced as two or three syllables. Some speakers and regional varieties also use before , , and/or ; such lengthening may be more irregular than others. Lengthening is prohibited in the past tense of irregular verbs and function words and in modern contractions of polysyllabic words where the /æ/ was before a consonant followed by a vowel. Lengthening is not stopped by the addition of word-level suffixes.
Note that British dialects with the bad-lad split have instead
broad in some words where an or follows the vowel. In this circumstance, Australian speakers usually (but not universally) use , except in the words ‘aunt’, ‘can’t’ and ‘shan’t’, which have broad .
Daniel Jones noted for RP that some speakers had a phonemic contrast between a long and a short which he wrote as and , respectively. Thus, in ''An outline of English phonetics'' (1962, ninth edition, Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons) he noted that ''sad'', ''bad'' generally had but ''lad'', ''pad'' had . In his pronouncing dictionary, he recorded several minimal pairs, for example ''bad'' , ''bade'' (also pronounced as ). He noted that for some speakers, ''jam'' actually represented two different pronunciations, one pronounced meaning 'fruit conserve', the other meaning 'crush, wedging'. Later editions of this dictionary edited by
Alfred C. Gimson, dropped this distinction.
Commonly also in these accents, ''can'' 'able to' is , whereas the noun ''can'' 'tin' or the verb ''can'' 'to put into a tin' is ; this is similar to the situation found in
æ-tensing in some varieties of
American English. Australian speakers who use ‘span’ as the past tense of ‘spin’ also have a minimal pair between ‘to span’ (the bridges the river) and , the past tense of ‘spin’ (the ball ). Various other minimal pairs can be created in the slang speech of social groups as meaning ‘agriculture’ vs , a
La Trobe University–specific term referring to the part of the Uni known in full as the Agora.
Apart from Jones,
dictionary makers have never shown a difference between these varieties of the historical .
æ-tensing
In the
sociolinguistics of
English, 'æ-tensing' is a process that occurs in some
accents of
North American English by which the vowel is raised and lengthened or
diphthongized in various environments. The realization of this "tense æ" varies from to to to , depending on the speaker's
regional accent. The most common realization is probably (that is, a centering diphthong with a starting point closer than the vowel as in ''dress''); that transcription will be used for convenience in this article.
Phonemic æ-tensing in the Mid-Atlantic region
In
Philadelphia and
New York, the tense is a separate
phoneme from (in Labovian linguistic variable notation, the phonemes are represented as (aeh) and (ae) respectively), since certain minimal pairs can be found:
★ ''can'' 'metal container' vs. ''can'' 'be able'
★ ''halve'' vs. ''have''
In these accents there has thus been a
phonemic split. Nevertheless, the distribution between and is largely predictable in the Philadelphia and
New York regions: In Philadelphia, tense occurs in closed
syllables before the , , , , and , as well as the words ''mad'', ''bad'', and ''glad''. In New York, tensing occurs in all those environments as well as before voiced
stops and . Lax usually occurs before , , and voiceless stops, and also usually occurs in open syllables regardless of the following consonant. In Philadelphia, tensing in some lexical items before and nontautosyllabic nasals has been reported.
| Tense | Lax |
|---|
| man | | hang | |
| ham | | pal | |
| laugh | | lap | |
| bath | | bat | |
| glass | | manage | |
The main exceptions to the above generalizations are:
#When a
vowel-initial word-level
suffix is added to a word with tense , the vowel remains even though it has come to stand in an open syllable:
#:''mannish'' has like ''man'', not like ''manage''
#:''classy'' has like ''class'', not like ''classic''
#:''passing'' has like ''pass'', not like ''Pasadena''
#When a polysyllabic word with in an open syllable gets truncated to a single closed syllable, the vowel remains:
#:''caf'' (truncation of ''cafeteria'') has , not like ''calf''
#:''path'' (truncation of ''pathology'') has , not like ''path'' 'way, road'
#:''Mass'' (truncation of ''Massachusetts'') has , not like ''mass''
#
Function words and
irregular verb tenses have lax , even in an environment which would usually cause tensing:
#:''and'' (a function word) has , not like ''sand''
#:''ran'' (an irregular verb tense) has , not like ''man''
The phoneme is also used in these accents before intervocalic in words like ''dairy'' and ''Mary'' and in
non-rhotic varieties of these accents in words like ''square'' and ''scarce'' (which rhymes with ''glass'' for many non-rhotic speakers).
The phonemic tensing of ''æ'' is similar to the
broad A phenomenon of certain other dialects. The environment of broad A overlaps with that of æ-tensing, in that broad A occurs before voiceless fricatives in the same syllable and before nasals in certain environments; and both phenomena involve replacement of the short lax vowel with a longer and tenser vowel. However, the "broad A" is lower and backer than , while the result of æ-tensing is higher and fronter.
It is also related to the
bad-lad split of some Southern British and Australian dialects, in which a short flat is lengthened to in some conditions. The most significant differences from the Philadelphian system described here are that bad-lad splitting dialects have the
broad A phenomenon, so the split can't occur there; that 'sad' is long; and that lengthening can occur before and .
In ''
Webster's Third New International Dictionary'' (1961; Springfield, Mass: Merriam-Webster Inc.), the Mid-Atlantic tense æ (written with a(ə), the lax æ being ) is shown at individual entries as a variant
pronunciation; for instance, the pronunciation of ''can'' "container" is 'kan, -aa(É™)n. In the 11th (2003) edition of ''Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary'', which is partly derived from the Third unabridged, the distinction is discussed in an introductory section on pronunciation but ignored elsewhere in the text. The editors justify their decision by maintaining that "this distinction is sufficiently infrequent that the traditional practice of using a single symbol is followed in this book" (p. 34a).
Non-phonemic æ-tensing
In accents that have undergone the
Northern cities vowel shift, the phoneme is raised and tensed in all environments, to or even higher.
[1]
Most other dialects of American English display an which is raised and tensed in some environments and lower and laxer in others, without splitting it into two contrasting phonemes as the New York and Philadelphia accents do. A common one is the "nasal system", in which is raised and tensed to exclusively before
nasal consonants, regardless of whether there is a syllabic or morphemic boundary present. The nasal system is found in several separate and unrelated dialect regions, including the southern
Midwest, northern
New Jersey, and
Florida, among others, but it is most prominent—that is, the difference between the two allophones of is greatest, and speakers with the nasal system are most concentrated—in eastern
New England (''see
Boston accent'').
More widespread among speakers of the
Western United States and southern Midwest is a "continuous" system. This resembles the nasal system in that is usually raised and tensed to before nasal consonants, but instead of a sharp divide between high tense before nasals and low lax before other consonants,
allophones of occupy a continuum of varying degrees of height and tenseness between those two extremes, with a variety of phonetic and phonological factors interacting (sometimes differently in different dialects) to determine the height and tenseness of any particular example of .
In the
Southern United States, the pattern most characteristic of
Southern American English does not employ æ-tensing at all, but rather what has been called the "Southern drawl": becomes in essence a
triphthong . However, many speakers from the South have the nasal æ-tensing system described above, particularly in
Charleston,
Atlanta, and
Florida; and speakers from
New Orleans have been reported to have a system very similar to the phonemic split of New York
[2].
1. Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006:ch. 13)
2. Labov, "Transmission and Diffusion"
Flag-plague merger
For some speakers in Canada and the northern and northwestern United States, a following tenses an as much as or more than a following nasal does; in much the
Midwest not affected by the
Northern Cities Vowel Shift, this extends to the point that
merges with before , so that ''flag'' rhymes with ''plague''. These usually remain distinct from as in ''egg''.
Development of the phoneme
In Modern English, a new phoneme developed that didn't exist in
Middle English. The phoneme comes from three sources: the word ''father'' failing to participate in the change of to in the
Great Vowel Shift; the
compensatory lengthening of the short in words like ''calm'', ''palm'', ''psalm'' when was lost in this environment; and the lengthening of before /r/ in words like ''car'', ''card'', ''hard'', ''part'', etc. In dialects that developed the
broad A class, words containing it joined this new phoneme as well. The new phoneme also became common in
onomatopoeic words like ''baa'', ''ah'', ''ha ha'', as well as in foreign borrowed words like ''spa'', ''taco'', ''llama'', ''drama'', ''lava'', ''Bahamas'', ''pasta'', many of which vary between and among different dialects of English.
See also
★
Phonological history of the English language
★
Phonological history of English vowels
References
Trap-bath split
★
Accents of English, Wells, John C., , , Cambridge University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-521-22919-7 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-521-24224-X (vol. 2), ISBN 0-521-24225-8 (vol. 3)
★ Gupta, A. F., Baths and becks, ''English Today'' 81, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp21-27 (2005).
Bad-lad split
★ Horvath, Barbara M. and Ronald J. Horvath. (
2001). Short A in Australian English: A geolinguistic study. In ''English in Australia'', ed. D. Blair and P. Collins, 341–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
★
Australia's Many Voices, Leitner, Gerhard., , , Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, ISBN 3-11-018194-0 (vol. 1), ISBN 3-11-018195-9 (vol.2)
★
Accents of English, Wells, John C., , , Cambridge University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-521-22919-7 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-521-24224-X (vol. 2), ISBN 0-521-24225-8 (vol. 3)
æ-tensing
★ Benua, L. 1995. Identity effects in
morphological truncation. In ''Papers in
optimality theory'', ed. J. N. Beckman, L. Walsh Dickey, and S. Urbanczyk.
UMass Occasional Papers 18.
Amherst: GLSA, 77–136.
★ Ferguson, C. A. 1972. "Short a" in Philadelphia English. In ''Studies in linguistics in honor of George L. Trager'', ed. M. E. Smith, 259–74.
The Hague: Mouton.
★ Kahn, D. 1976. Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology.
Ph.D. dissertation,
UCLA. Reproduced by the
Indiana University Linguistics Club.
★
Labov, W. 1966. ''The social stratification of English in New York City.''
Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
★ Labov, W. 1972. ''Sociolinguistic patterns''. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
★ Labov, W. 1981. Resolving the
Neogrammarian controversy. ''Language'' 57:267–308.
★ Labov, W. 2005.
Transmission and Diffusion.
★
The Atlas of North American English, Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, , , Mouton de Gruyter, 2006, ISBN 3-11-016746-8
★ Trager, G. L. 1930. The pronunciation of "short ''a''" in American Standard English. ''American Speech'' 5:396–400.
★ Trager, G. L. 1934. What conditions limit variants of a phoneme? ''American Speech'' 9:313–15.
★ Trager, G. L. 1940. One phonemic entity becomes two: The case of "short ''a''". ''American Speech'' 15:255–58.
★ Trager, G. L. 1941. ''Maître Phonétique'' 17–19.
★
Wells, J. C. 1982. ''Accents of English.'' 3 vols.
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
External links
★
Sounds Familiar? — Listen to examples of regional accents and dialects on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website, including an audio "bath" map of the UK
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