mail,sale,male

[peter123]

Hi all native speakers

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

[Soup]

/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.

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Soup

/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.

Yes - note the colon; someone who isn't a linguist can surely hear the difference between "sell" and "sale".

b

[Soup]

Originally Posted by BobK

Yes - note the colon; someone who isn't a linguist can surely hear the difference between "sell" and "sale".

b

Sell and sale are distinctive, though, no matter if the vowel is long ([:]) or short; they house different vowels:

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.

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Soup

Sell and sale are distinctive, though, no matter if the vowel is long ([:]) or short; they house different vowels:

sell, s[ɛ]ll (mid-front lax vowel)
sale, s[ey]l (off-glide: mid-front tense vowel + high-front y)

...

It seems to me that your "[ɛ]" might be confused with Peter's "/e/". It's a shame that OUP, for their widely used phonemic chart (I haven't seen it online, except for a bootleg copy of my own!), use "/e/".

Originally Posted by peter123

Hi all native speakers

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

b

[Soup]

Originally Posted by BobK

It seems to me that your "[ɛ]" might be confused with Peter's "/e/". It's a shame that OUP, for their widely used phonemic chart (I haven't seen it online, except for a bootleg copy of my own!), use "/e/".

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?

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Soup

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?

On that phonemic chart I mentioned, it's the diphthong /eɪ/. I've seen it represented phonetically as [ej]. There are some dialects of Br E that have a close [e] monophthong, but RP has a diphthong, which I believe is the same (or almost the same) as your /ey/.

b

[Soup]

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

[peter123]

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

[AngloKelt]

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?