[QUOTE=AHunter3]
It’s my understanding that most folks from the UK would say that the vowel in “path” is neither akin to the vowel sound in “bat” nor to the one in “father”. If you’ve heard a lot of Americans trying to imitate British English pronunciation I’d imagine you hear a lot of overly drawn-out “aa” sounds in words that ought to be sounded like the vowel in path? To most of us, and to me for sure, that middle in-between vowel sound just doesn’t exist as a separate entity.
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I think there’s a misunderstanding here, which perhaps has its roots in the idea that you can mimic a generic ‘British accent’. Most Brits would say the vowel in ‘path’ is either the one in ‘bat’ or that in ‘father’. It’s perhaps the most clear, or at least well-known, case of a north/south divide in accents, northerners plumping for the shorter ‘bat’ sound. I’ve even seen cases of dogs which have been trained with one version and do not respond (with their normal terrified whimpering) to the threat of a ‘bath’ in the other. (Also there’s my neighbour’s dog, who they trained with their South African accents, and would do nothing to a command of ‘sit’ from anybody English, but happily obeyed to an elongated ‘seet’.)