why is the pronunciation of english so unstable?

The strange thing with 'but' and 'bat' for me is that it's not so much about those vowel sounds generally, but for those specific words — I tend to pronounce 'but' as 'bat', but I can't say the same for 'putt' and 'pat'. But that might be because I'd be more inclined to pronounce 'pat' somewhat like 'pet', but I wouldn't ever pronounce 'bat' as 'bet'.

The other weird thing I do is that I never pronounce 'and' as written. Although it's very common to pronounce 'and' as 'an', which I do, I also often pronounce it as 'ant'. The same often goes for 'Englant', 'Scotlant', 'Polant' etc. as well.

I do have to agree with the OP to an extent — English pronunciation is extremely unstable. Even for someone like me who supposedly speaks RP, I have many unconformities.

I really put my foot in it last time my cousins were down from Scotland, their Grandad wen't to that School, Fettes. My mam, Nan and I were moaning about how Blair can't speak normaly (ie. Northern like us, we moan at the southern newsreader on look north who says "garaage" rather than "garige"), anyway, the fact that my cousins go to a private school, and also their late grandad wen't to Fettes slipped my mind, and I started going on a rant about "Blair being a posh tory boy pretending to be leftwing, and he speaks stupidly because of his private school education!".....after saying this I realised my faux pas, and sort of tailed off my rant, their poor little faces looking kind of shocked, . Their Grandad was a realy nice bloke, he sounded very Scottish, so they might not have taken it the wrong way. Nothing was said, but I feel really guilty!Ooops!

>>The other weird thing I do is that I never pronounce 'and' as written. Although it's very common to pronounce 'and' as 'an', which I do, I also often pronounce it as 'ant'. The same often goes for 'Englant', 'Scotlant', 'Polant' etc. as well. <<

The pronunciation of "and" so that it is homophonous with "an", that is, as [E{~:n] is extremely common here as well, despite that our two dialects are on separate branches of English overall (NA English versus English English). One thing I suspect about cases like this is that they are actually very widespread underlying pronunciation variants of words which just happen to be ignored or to be thought of as change when they are actually noticed, due to the influence of orthography and standard forms, even if they may very well have been there all along.

I also have a pronunciation of "and" similar to "ant", but it is not exactly homophonous with it. I pronounce "ant" as [E{~n?] or [E{~nt], whereas such pronunciations of "and" include [E{~:nd_0] and [E{~:nt]; the most important difference here is vowel length, but other differences include "ant" potentially having a glottal stop and "and" potentially having a voiceless lenis stop.

Actually, the formal pronunciation of "and" here would be [E{~nd_0], with it only having a fully voiced stop, as [E{~nd], before another word starting with a vowel. The word-final devoicing is really only noticable when the [d_0] is made fortis as [t], which may happen sporadically.

Anyways, it is interesting to hear of full word-final devoicing in RP. Just for the record, is this an isolated lexically-specific case, or is this an instance of actual systematic word-final devoicing?

I think most speakers of English commonly omit the [d] in 'and' in normal conversational speech. I still have [{nd] sometimes but it's usually [{n] or [@n]/[In] for me. What's interesting is that English, like German, has retained the /d/ in at least some cases of "and" while some other Western Germanic languages like Dutch don't have it anymore (it's 'en' in Dutch as far as I know).

Which is the most archaic pronunciation/dialect of English?
The Appalachian one?

>>>Which is the most archaic pronunciation/dialect of English?
The Appalachian one?<<

One cannot really speak of particular English dialects being archaic versus progressive across the board in practice, but rather only archaic versus progressive with respect to specific features.

Dinnae fret about it JIM....just buy them all a Belhaven 90/- next time you're up here and they'll be as blithe as pigs in the proverbial ;-)

> What's interesting is that English, like German, has retained the /d/ in at least some cases of "and" while some other Western Germanic languages like Dutch don't have it anymore (it's 'en' in Dutch as far as I know).

Yes, 'and' is 'en' in Dutch; the /d/ has been lost. It is too in Afrikaans; /d/ is also always devoiced at the end of words so it sounds like /t/ for example 'hart' (heart) and 'hard' (hard) are homophones.

There is an even stronger tendency towards consonant loss especially at the end of words. Sewe (seven), nege (nine), pos (post), kus (coast), oos (east), wes (west), hawe (port [haven]). Interestingly the word for eight can be spelled with or without a /t/ as 'ag' or 'agt' so it would appear to be in the process of being lost.

>>Yes, 'and' is 'en' in Dutch; the /d/ has been lost. It is too in Afrikaans; /d/ is also always devoiced at the end of words so it sounds like /t/ for example 'hart' (heart) and 'hard' (hard) are homophones.<<

However, is word-final devoicing always present in Afrikaans? IIRC, in the case of German, word-final devoicing will at times not occur when a word is followed by another word starting with a vowel. If such also occurred in Afrikaans, it would mean that "hart" and "hard" would only usually but always be homophones.

>>There is an even stronger tendency towards consonant loss especially at the end of words. Sewe (seven), nege (nine), pos (post), kus (coast), oos (east), wes (west), hawe (port [haven]). Interestingly the word for eight can be spelled with or without a /t/ as 'ag' or 'agt' so it would appear to be in the process of being lost.<<

Such is also present in many English dialects today with respect to consonant clusters, but in that case such reduced forms usually still exist in alternation with unreduced forms, which are also usually the basis of things such as plurals, except in the case of certain sorts of cluster reduction in Jamaican English and AAVE.

>However, is word-final devoicing always present in Afrikaans? IIRC, in the case of German, word-final devoicing will at times not occur when a word is followed by another word starting with a vowel. If such also occurred in Afrikaans, it would mean that "hart" and "hard" would only usually but always be homophones.

Yes, d is always devoiced at the end of a word so 'hard' and 'hart' are always homophones, for example in the sentence: 'Sy hart is hard' (His heart is hard)

>> Lol, seriously need recordings because. But, Put, Book, rhyme for me! <<

Ok, "but", and "puck", "love", "some" have the same vowel as in "the", whereas "book", "foot", "soot" and "put" don't-- "book" rhymes with "cook" and "look", but I bet those all rhyme for you too. Most words with "oo" that don't have the long "oo" (like in "cool") use this sound. Most -ut words sound like "the" except for "put."

The way this thread is going just shows how "unstable" the language really is. But it's not really a problem. If dialects become mutually unintelligible--like with Latin--we can do what the Arabs did. Arabic "dialects" are basically separate languages which evolved from Classical Arabic, just like the Romance languages evolved from Latin. But they have a single standardized form (Modern Standard Arabic, usually learned in school) which speakers of different dialects can communicate with each other with. Could the future of English look like this?

By the way, I've been learning MSA since last June and just this week we started getting into Egyptian Arabic and boy is it different.

Tom K, that sounds very interesting, I doubt very much that would happen with English, English Dialects seem to be merging. At one time you could ride from Yorkshire to the West Midlands and you wouldn't be able to understand their version of English, and that was within the last couple of hundred years. With the expansion of the evil "Estuary English" if not in accent, but also in dialect, the creation of a unified English accent and language seems inevitable, something far more stable than what we have now, that of course is only in England. Internationaly the American version of English seems to be taking over as well, words such as "cool" which in the 60's seemed very alian to us are common to our ears. You only have to look at the Australian influence on English today, with what I've heard described as the "moronic influx", that stupid way of talking where you go high pitched at the end of a sentance, like a question...?

>>The way this thread is going just shows how "unstable" the language really is. But it's not really a problem. If dialects become mutually unintelligible--like with Latin--we can do what the Arabs did. Arabic "dialects" are basically separate languages which evolved from Classical Arabic, just like the Romance languages evolved from Latin. But they have a single standardized form (Modern Standard Arabic, usually learned in school) which speakers of different dialects can communicate with each other with. Could the future of English look like this?<<

I myself agree that the future of English could most definitely look like this. In the very least, it is quite likely that the current classical literary language would be retained even after the English dialect continua significantly lose crossintelligibility across their wholes. However, such is different from creating a whole new unified *spoken* standard English, both beyond the current multiple standards and beyond simply reading the formal literary language using the pronunciation of either the local dialect or the local standard (i.e. like how Classical Chinese is normally read).

The problem also here is also that one would not be able to easily create a single unified standard, unlike in the case of Arabic, as there is no already existing common classical language with clear spoken pronunciations to simply "modernize". As a result, if one were to bring about some kind of single common spoken standard, such could effectively only do via the reconstruction of English pronunciation prior to the American-British split. The problem with this, though, is that it would likely be perceived as rather artificial and thus would not be that likely to be accepted, unlike simply retaining the classical literary language as is while having local pronunciations of such, which would be a far easier route in practice.