1093: Negative Forms with Distinct Pronunciations Dec 6, 2017

For many people—particularly outside of the U.K.—the vowel in the negative contraction of 'can', 'can't', is the same one, either [a] or [æ], as is used for the positive form. This should make sense, since with the exception of 'do', none of the commonly used words with a negative contractional form change their vowels, but this was not always the case. In Middle English, many verbs that were irregular would have a phonetically distinct negative form. Then, 'can' was pronounced [kæn] like its pronounced in Standard American English today, but 'can't was pronounced as [kɑ:nt]. For this word, there is a similar situation that happens in Received Pronunciation, or other souther English dialects, but this occurred in many more words at the time. Not only was the vowel different, but one the positive form was short while the negative form was long.