about through: Rounding caused by a following dark L (which may no longer be sounded), to produce (in RP) the sound in also, alter, ball, call, chalk, halt, talk, etc.. See English-language vowel changes before historic /l/. Rounding following , resulting in the same two vowels as above, as in wash, what, quantity, water, warm. This change is typically blocked before a velar consonant, as in wag, quack and twang, and is also absent in swam (the irregular past tense of swim). See Phonological history of English low back vowels (17th-century changes). Reduction to schwa in most unstressed syllables, as in about, along, Hilary, comma, solar, standard, breakfast. (Like other instances of schwa, this can combine with a following , or to produce a syllabic consonant in certain environments, as in rival.) Another possible reduced pronunciation (depending on dialect) is in cases where the reduction of vowel might be expected, -ace, -age, -ate (only adjectives and nouns), as in the second syllables of palace, message and private, etc. Irregular developments in a few words, particularly any and many. In the case of any, the spelling represents the pronunciation in the Midland dialect of Middle English, while the modern pronunciation comes from that of the southern dialect (the alternative spelling eny is also found in texts up to around 1530; the spelling ony, representing a northern dialect pronunciation, is also found). The situation is similar with many (with the spellings meny and mony formerly occurring). See also List of Latin-script digraphs Phonological history of the English language Phonological history of English vowels Notes References Gupta, A. F., Baths and becks, English Today 81, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp21–27 (2005). 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 For -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. PhD 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