The /a/ ('short A') was found in words such as cat and trap, and also before /r/ in words such as start. Late Middle English had two phonemes /a/ and /aː/, differing only in length. ( January 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Separate developments have produced additional pronunciations in words like wash, talk and comma. These processes have produced the main four pronunciations of ⟨a⟩ in present-day English: those found in the words trap, face, father and square (with the phonetic output depending on whether the dialect is rhotic or not, and, in rhotic dialects, whether or not the Mary-merry merger occurs). The sound of the long vowel was altered in the Great Vowel Shift, but later a new long A (or 'broad A') developed which was not subject to the shift. Most of these go back to the low vowel (the 'short A') of earlier Middle English, which later developed both long and short forms. There are a variety of pronunciations in modern English and in historical forms of the language for words spelled with the letter ⟨a⟩. For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
