For all those people who wanna know why I say words the way I do, I present you with the Philadelphian Phonetic Guide of the Vowel A.
You use tense -a:
— Before -m and -n: e.g., ham, man, fan, pecan (high-class Philadelphians
sometimes say pe-cahn, but of course without changing any of the other
words).
— Before -f, -th, -s: laugh, staff, bath, glass.
— In three words ending in -d: mad, bad, glad (but lahd, pahd, brahd, gahd
about).
Exceptions:
— -ng gets lax -a: fan is tense, fang is fahng.
— Irregular verbs get lax a: can (a can of peas) is tense; can (I cahn do
it) is lax. So are ran, swam, began, am. And the sub-literate dialect word
wan, as in “We wahn the war.”
— Exception to the exception: can the verb is lax, can’t is tense.
— The article “an” is lax.
— If a vowel comes after -m or -n in the word, the “a” turns lax: ham is
tense, hammer is lax. Fan tense, fanny lax.
I miss you, Philly.
