Re: USAGE: [e] vs. [E] (was Re: Two questions about Esperanto)

Philip Newton wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:13:12 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>
>>On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 11:33:25PM -0400, Ph. D. wrote:
>>
>>>Allow me to quote Richardson in _Learning_and_Using_the_International
>>>_Language_:
>>>
>>>   To get the sound of "e" really right, do this: Place two fingers lightly
>>>   across your mouth . . . and say "they" very carefully. Feel how the
>>>   lips and jaw shift position midway through the "ey" sound. That's
>>>   because in English, the sound of "ey" is really made up of two sounds:
>>>   "eh" followed by "ee".  Now practice saying just the "eh" without
>>>   sliding into the "ee" sound. That is how you pronounce "e" correctly
>>>   in Esperanto.
>>
>>And that is a description of the sound spelled in X-SAMPA as [e].
>
>
> Hm? The sound I'd render in English as "eh" is X-SAMPA [E] (though it
> can be [e] in SAMPA-for-English IIRC).
How 'eh' is understood depends on where you come from. To me and most
people I speak to, eh means a short E with no following consonants. In
America, it somehow means a long A. You may have misunderstood...

(To people who interpret 'eh' as long A, what does 'meh' represent?)

> The "long a" diphthong is [EI] for me, or possibly [Ei] or [Ej], i.e.
> its first component is [E], not [e].
Varies over many variables. Assume when someone says 'English', they
don't mean the dialect of English you speak, and never meant it to be a
broad generalisation of everyenglisher's speech.

>>[e] does
>>*not* mean "the English long-a sound".  It means "the English long-a
>>sound without the glide"
>
>
> Not for this English speaker. [Ej] is what usually comes out when a
> generic Anglophone
sif such a thing exists... :)

>>or "the Spanish e-sound" - both of which are
>>different from [E], which is the English short-e sound.
>
>
> I thought that "the Spanish e-sound" was also [E]. How would you transcribe it?
IIUC it has two allophones, one of [E], one of [e]. Seeing as [E] is
found in American English and Spanish, it's probably not felt as a
'Spanish e-sound'.

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