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#1
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| I 've heard many people including native speakers say the words 'mail', 'male', 'sale' as /mel/, /mel/, /sel/ instead of the correct pronounciation /meil/, /mei/, /seil/, why? Many thanks Peter |
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#2
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| /e/ and /ey/ are not distinctive in English. For example, pronounce /meyl/ as [mel] and it won't change the word's meaning. From a phonetic point of view, /ey/ is longer than /e/ but not that much longer because the off-glide /-y/ is slight. A linguist can hear the different between /e:/ and /ey/, but as for the everyday person, there's no harm in pronouncing e.g., sale as [se:l] or [sel] since it doesn't change the meaning of the word. |
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#3
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| Quote:
b |
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#4
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| Quote:
sell, s[ɛ]ll (mid-front lax vowel) sale, s[ey]l (off-glide: mid-front tense vowel + high-front y) sell, e as in the sound of e in bed. sale, a as in the sound of a in ale. |
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#5
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| Quote:
b |
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#6
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| Hold on. I seem to recall reading somewhere--could have been in college--that where American English has /ey/, British English has /e/. Is that true? |
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#7
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| Quote:
b |
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#8
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| Yes. That's right. And the process is called monophthongization. There are also lax vowel variants for y (also written j): [eˆ] (a lax high central vowel) [eI] (a lax high front vowel) I believe, but could be wrong, that the second one is Canadian. The first one is US, New England area (I think): http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/TLN/TLNPWPL.pdf |
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#9
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| Hi there, But I often hear people saying the word the 'sale' with the same sound in 'sell'. Both of them are pronounced as [e] sound. Right? Thanks pete |
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#10
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| You should really pronounce sale with an ey sound as in "day". Sale is a noun. Sell (the verb) has the short e sound pronounced as in "egg". Whether you sound the diphthong ei/ey or not doesn't really matter. However if you pronounce sale the same as sell, most native English speakers would think you had made a grammatical error confusing the noun with the verb. I am going to a sale (noun) I am going to sell (verb) my house. If you said "I am going to sale my house", it might sound like the verb "sail" - I have an image of a man sailing his house down the river. If you said "I am going to a sell". People might confuse it with a cell - like a prison cell and might imagine you are being sent to prison. The rule here is that A followed by a consonant then an E generally sounds like ey/ei. Similar words are dale, vale, pale. This rule applies to many other words such as: mate, fate, make, bake, cake etc. E followed by a double consonant is usually a short e as in egg. Similarly you have tell, bell, fell, dell, smell, teller, better, letter. Isn't English wonderful? |
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