Amy's pronunciation

[pne]

I think Amy's slowly twigging to the fact that /æ/ and /ɛ/ are separate phonemes in English, but occasionally mixes them up. (In German, both sounds tend to become /ɛ/ in loanwords, so e.g. "band" in the musical sense is pronounced like "bent".)

She usually gets the sounds right, and I think she's beginning to realise that she can pronounce both sounds distinctly, and that this is important in English.

Comments

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

(In German, both sounds tend to become /ɛ/ in loanwords, so e.g. "band" in the musical sense is pronounced like "bent".)

Interesting. I wonder whether something similar in Dutch (and thence Afrikaans) might have led South African English to merge /æ/ and /ɛ/?

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

I don't think they have merged. At least when I was in Pretoria, their /ɛ/ sounded very much like [e:] to me whereas their /æ/ sounded something like [ɛ] or [æ] to me.

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Ah. Perhaps it's just the South Africans I have experience with hearing (who have, admittedly, been here in Australia for quite some time now).

But in any event, I can't say I've ever heard the pronunciation [e:] from any South African for the phoneme /ɛ/; [e] perhaps, but never lengthened.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"[e] perhaps, but never lengthened."

That's entirely possible. Since German basically only has [e:], I'm not sure I'd be able to tell [e] and [e:] apart easily.

[pne.livejournal.com]

German basically only has [e:]

In native words, yes - but what about in words such as "Geografie"?

(Though at least one dictionary I saw used the half-length mark for such vowels, rather than leaving them short by default. Similarly with other vowels in un(-primary-)stressed open syllables such as Politik or Pyramide.)

Though having said that, I realise that the difference in length is not phonemic, so your point still stands, I think.