any
asphalt
doppelganger
dromedary
googleganger
many
secondary
12 responses to “a as in any”
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Secondary?
Ah good point, added to the list, thankyou!
Not in Australia – it’s three syllables, not four: sekəndri
Also doppelganger and googleganger have a short a sound, even in Melbourne.
My source for these lists was the Macquarie Dictionary of a bit over a decade ago, and the copy is in my office and I’m at home right now, I’ll see if I can remember to look this up but I’m pretty sure I checked them all with the phonetic script. Of course the pronunciation may have changed now.
botany and company?
In my accent the letter “a” in “botany”, “company”, “litany”, “accompany” and “Tiffany” is an unstressed vowel (schwa) not an /e/ sound, but maybe it’s an /e/ as in “red” in your accent.
says?
Hi Brooke, in my accent ‘says’ is pronounced /sɛz/ so at the phoneme level the vowel is /e/ and the spelling is /ay/ but its spelling is better explained from a morphological and etymological point of view: in the Olden Days people did say the /ae/ sound in this word, just as they said “sayed” but now we just say /e/. If you teach ‘say’, ‘said’ and ‘says’ together when you’re doing ‘ay’ and ‘ai’ as in pay/paid and lay/laid, then it makes perfect sense, it’s just that our accent has changed.
maybe the a in ‘momentary’?
Momentary may have a schwa or ‘tree’ sound, but and maybe letter a is sounded as ‘e’ in voluntarily, necessarily, unnecessarily (other words ending with ‘arily’ seem to have an ‘air’ sound)
anything, anywhere, stationary?
Hi, I could add compounds and derived forms (also anybody, anytime, anyway, anymore) but that would make the lists super-huge and unwieldy. The Macquarie Dictionary says there are three ways to pronounce ‘stationary’ (eliding the second-last vowel, pronouncing it as a schwa or pronouncing it as /e/) so I didn’t want to add it or similar words like ‘honorary’, ‘secretary’ and ‘functionary’ that people often pronounce more than one way. It’s more useful to teach kids to pronounce the suffix ‘ary’ as it is spelt when writing it from my point of view.