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Americans pronouncing /e/ as /eɪ/ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5366 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes  Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 1 of 7 18 April 2011 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I was wondering if someone could give me an explanation as to why this occurs? It's not that the /e/ sound doesn't exist in English, just never at the end of a word. But even if an American comes across a foreign word where /e/ occurs in the middle of the word, they will pronounce it /eɪ/ - /metsæ/ for example becomes /meɪtsə/. Most Americans can't even hear the difference, in my experience, and those that can and are aware of the difference between the sounds STILL mix them up, some more often than others; this is including the others studying linguistics at my university AND my linguistics professor. This is an incredibly aggravating habit and I honestly don't see why this is such a widespread problem and why Americans can't hear the difference between these two incredibly different sounds. We have words in the language like "bread" and "braid" that differ in sound ONLY because of this vowel, and yet take off the /d/ at the end and Americans can't hear the difference! Does orthography have anything to do with it?
I used "Americans" throughout my post because I don't know if this occurs in other varieties of English, although my guess is that it does. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5284 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 2 of 7 18 April 2011 at 3:58am | IP Logged | ||
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That's a good question and I've wondered about it myself. Here's how I see it. I think we are dealing with three sounds: [ɛ e eɪ]. Examples:
BREAD [bɹɛd] EGG [eg] HEY [heɪ] However I find that [eɪ] is also an allophone of [e]. For example the word EGG can also be rendered as [eɪg], EGGS as [eɪgz], etcetera. This seems to be quite common at least in the midwest and I've heard it a number of times. So you would have the following phoneme/sound relations: /ɛ/ -> [ɛ] /e/ -> [e], [eɪ] /eɪ/ -> [eɪ] Then you have to take into account phoneme mapping. Take Spanish as an example of a foreign language. Americans would map Spanish sounds to English phonemes like this: [ei] -> /eɪ/ [e] -> /e/ [ɛ] -> /ɛ/ Where Spanish has /ei/ -> [ei] and /e/ -> [e], [ɛ]. Further helping the mapping of Spanish [e] to English /e/ instead of /ɛ/ is the fact that many times Spanish [e] is more close (raised) than English [e], which would separate it even further from /ɛ/. So, because of the mapping of [e] to English /e/, the English speaker's renditions of /e/ will depend on the phonetic environment, following (partly or fully) English phonotactic rules. This accounts for the high incidence of word final /e/ pronounced like [eɪ], and maybe also for the cases of syllable final /e/. I don't know enough about [e]/[eɪ] allophonic alternation in (American) English to speculate any further, but maybe someone better informed can help us out. It would be very interesting to unravel this puzzle. (I personally don't think it has much at all to do with orthography.) Edited by getreallanguage on 18 April 2011 at 4:06am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5824 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 7 21 April 2011 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm pretty certain it has nothing to do will orthography -- most of the English-speaking settlers in the US would have been pretty much illiterate (as were most English-speakers in the UK at the time) so their language variety would have been defined by speech.
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| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5366 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 4 of 7 22 April 2011 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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The reason I brought up orthography is because it's no wonder an English speaker is going to pronounce for example "bugee" as /bjugi/ instead of /bugi/ yet "boogee" would indeed be /bugi/, because that's the name we've given the U is /ju/! Same goes for /i/ getting pronounced as /aɪ/ instead of /i/ because that's the name we call that letter by, thus my name Ian often gets pronounced /aɪən/. Honestly I believe if English had an orthography that indicated each of its how-ever-many vowels (14, was it?) each with its own, SEPARATE letter then a lot of these bizarre pronunciation whims wouldn't occur in the language. If /e/ and /eɪ/ would have always been indicated with 2 different letters instead of using a single letter for each instance (for example rendering /e/ as e and /eɪ/ as é) then I really don't think people would mix them up.
Of course we call E /i:/ and not /eɪ/ so that doesn't explain why people pronounce it that way. It really would be fascinating to know where this comes from! I find myself having a very difficult time trying to point out the difference to other Americanos because they simply DON'T hear the sound. The same goes for mixing up /oʊ/ and /o/, but that is understandable because we don't have the /o/ sound in English - mixing up /e/ and /eɪ/ makes NO sense because we have both of those sounds and they can both occur in the same phonetic environment (see the braid/bread example). Also I don't know about English having three E sounds...? The way I learned it was that the dipthong is /eɪ/ and by itself it's /ɛ/, I've just been writing /e/ because I'm too lazy. I'm 99% sure I say "egg" and "bread" with the same vowel. And getreallanguage you are 100% correct about /eɪ/ being an allophone of /e/ in words like "egg" and names like "Meghan", it is a mid-west thing, not something anyone really does in my neck of the woods but you do hear it. Furthermore can someone please explain why the vowel in "boot" is rendered as /u/ in the IPA? There is no way that sound is anywhere near an actual /u/. To me it is more closer to the /y/ like in Finnish or French, except approximately 1000x more lax. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5624 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 5 of 7 23 April 2011 at 1:54am | IP Logged | ||
Whether there is a connection with orthography, I don't know, but this isn't correct. Most settlers throughout the history of the US have been literate. Education was very highly valued by the Puritans who initially settled New England, and basic primary education, including reading and writing, became something of a more as a consequence. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in 1840, remarks on the remarkable universality of primary education in the US, even on the frontiers. The 1870 census, the earliest one I can find that measured literacy rates, puts the literacy rate at 80%, strikingly high, and probably reflective of the rate in the preceding decades. Illiteracy dropped off increasingly quickly beginning in the 1890s, as mandatory secondary education also became a norm. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cntrational Triglot Groupie India Joined 4940 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English* Studies: French | Message 6 of 7 23 April 2011 at 7:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Bread and braid are /brɛd/ and /breɪd/. English doesn't have /e/ as a separate phoneme.
The English /u/ is usually a centralized [ü:], sometimes even [ʉː] 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5366 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 7 of 7 25 April 2011 at 5:29am | IP Logged | ||
I don't know if I agree with this? I do know that it gets released as an [ʉː] in western dialects of American English like in Cali but to me a standard U sounds like it's more than one sound, namely a U followed by a W. Think of how one says "Ewwww!!" Isn't that really just a U sound dragged out so that the "w" becomes really prominent, the same as when you drag out an English O like in "Noooooooo" and if you do it long enough you get to a point where the only sound coming out is the second part of the dipthong, namely U. As for the U itself it sounds like it's somewhere between an /y/ and an /ɨ/? It just doesn't sound like an actual /u/ comes into play at all here. I mean I don't know what a "centralized [ü:]" sounds like so maybe. So it would look something like: /ɨʷ/ I think that superscript "w" can only be used with consonants but do you get my point? Or if not a "w" then something like /ɨy/ or /ɨu/?? It just really does not sound like a single sound, but a dipthong. I mean I could be taking out of my ass but I find it really hard to believe that the English U is an actual /u/... Edited by kyssäkaali on 25 April 2011 at 5:31am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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