The things you learn: aftermath

[pne]

Listening to this clip on YouTube, right at the beginning she said aftermath with a BATH vowel in the final syllable.

Huh! I had always used TRAP there, as in maths. (But then, I’m not sure whether I’ve ever heard the word spoken before.)

Looked it up on dictionary.com; its house dictionary only has TRAP for the final vowel, but further down, the

Comments

[kait_the_great]

My Canadian accent makes it tricky to say for sure, but I think you and I were using the same 'aftermath'.

My BATH goes with MATH (which we don't have the 's' on) and matches aftermath. Our MATH and MATHS match, I think. TRAP is pretty close to my MATH if not identical.

[pne]

If BATH goes with TRAP for you (which it sounds like) rather than witH PALM (as it does for me), then we probably don’t have the same sound. (Do you have the same vowel sound in “grass” as in “gas”, or “passing” and “passage”? If so, then you probably don’t have the split-like most Canadian accents, according to Wikipedia.)

Without the trap-bath split, aftermath would sound the same whether you assign the vowels to TRAP or to BATH, since without the split, BATH sounds like TRAP. (In general, at least; there’s æ-tensing, for example.) It’s only for those whose BATH sounds like PALM that you can hear a distinction, I think.

[kait_the_great]

Nope, no split for me.