Perhaps what I meant to say, GGG, was that we are vocally impure beings, though it was of course facetious to begin with. As diverse, indeed, as lovely as our vowel system is, there are no equivalents in our spoken language for the clear, sung vowels, which we find in most of the world’s languages.
fierywrath wrote:
when you say the english “a sound” before a vowel you can really hear the “i sound” in there. you might not hear the i in gay but you can hear it in gaiety. nevermind how about laying the natural tendency is to say ley-ying instead of ley-ing because there is a i/y sound.
did you think we write the y there just for fun? NO! it stands for the diphthong.
OK first things first - I’m quite happy to accept that there is a dipthong in the pronunciation of ‘pay’, although clearly something depends on individual usage and to my ear at least, the effect is more ‘pronounced’ in some accents than others. In Lucus’ terms, it’s often ‘paaaaaaaaaaaaaaay’, rather than ‘payyyyyyyy’
But I would ask you to consider:
a) it would be strange if adding ‘iety’ to a word didn’t introduce a hint of an ‘i’?;
b) ‘laying’ - surely, if there were an ‘i/y’ at the end of lay’, then the natural thing would be to say ‘lay-ing’, not ‘la-ying’?
c) How many 'y’s are there in pavement? Can you distinguish that first syllable from ‘pay’? I can’t, in my own accent at least. In other words, English spelling is not always a good predictor of pronunciation.
Nonetheless, I repeat: I’m happy to accept the point.
Regards
David.
Perhaps the difficulty stems from the fact that anglophones are not aware that when an English-speaking person recites the simple “a, e, i, o, u”, a latin-speaking person hears, mostly, diphthongs?
English
a = eh-ee
e = ee
i = ah-ee
o = oh-oo
u = ee-oo
See this link for diphthongs and you’ll find all the English vowel sounds there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong Pay close attention to the first line:
In phonetics, a diphthong (Greek ???, “diphthongos”, literally “with two sounds”) is a vowel combination in a single syllable involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, > often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme.
It seems to me that for an English-speaking person to get close to the latin pronounciation, he/she will have to start the vowel but never finish it. (Kinda like paaaaaay, as has been suggested).
Maybe just not the right ones…
I don’t think English has anything very close to the Latin long “e”, although you can approach it as much as possible by pronouncing the vowel in the word “pay” as a monophthong (without actually going to the final y). Ditto for the long “o”, maybe it is the vowel in the word “sew” in the same way.
I, a native anglophone, can produce pure (and long) a e o i u vowels without much difficulty, but I have had a significent amount of voice training. I do not know how easily I could have produced those pure sounds before all those voice lessons.
However, it shows that it is merely a matter of practice and training.
EDIT : I also recall a fairly humorous skit in the “Spanish for Gringos” video which demonstrates how entrenched anglophones can pronounce Spanish vowels.