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The one thing that confuses me the most are the AIR and EAR sounds as in AmERica and ExpERiment.

What exactly is the AIR/EAR sound? The AIR sound is basically a short E or a long A sound controlled by an R, correct? And the EAR sound is just a long E controlled by an R, right?

What is the official name of these sounds? How would I explain them to other learners? When do we use them?

More examples:
AIR: ERic, SquARE, bARE, mARried, mERry
EAR: bEER, mERE, fEAR, hERo

Kris
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Takumi
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    While using the EAR sound in "experiment" is not unknown, the AIR sound is more common and considered more standard. There is an earlier question about the prounciation of this word: What’s the geographic distribution of different pronunciations of the word “experiment”? For a number of American English speakers, the EAR sound is identified with the short I sound controlled by an R. See the following post on the English Language Learners Stack Exchange site: -eer vowel (accent/dialect variation?) – herisson Mar 23 '18 at 03:32
  • @Bread: Hmm, that's not a standard use of the term "controlled", although it's true that the way a vowel is pronounced phonetically is affected by the preceding sound. The /p/ in "experiment" is aspirated, which causes the start of the following vowel to be devoiced. Maybe that is what you are referring to. – herisson Mar 23 '18 at 04:05
  • What I mean is the short e sound is controlled by both consonants within the syllables: the p in addition to the r in experiment; and the m in addition to the r in American. So both consonants within each syllable has some effect on the sound of the vowel. Different consonants result in slightly different pronunciations. But that's really difficult (I should say virtually impossible) for a standard dictionary to express perfectly, for people who are not native English speakers. – Bread Mar 23 '18 at 04:05
  • @sumelic Yes, that's probably what I meant, thank you very much. – Bread Mar 23 '18 at 04:14
  • See also: [linguistics.se], [languagelearning.se] – Kris Mar 23 '18 at 06:16
  • Please let us know about your background research effort. You could at least do a broad google search and see. Good Luck. – Kris Mar 23 '18 at 06:17
  • @herisson I’ve always found ear / year / swear / sore to be an unusually good reference for many of these matters. – tchrist Feb 18 '23 at 22:52
  • In British English (and a few varieties of American English), bare, married, and merry are three different sounds and in many varieties of American English, hero and fear are two different sounds. – Peter Shor Feb 19 '23 at 14:54

2 Answers2

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What exactly is the AIR/EAR sound? The AIR sound is basically a short E or a long A sound controlled by an R, correct? And the EAR sound is just a long E controlled by an R, right?

English vowel pronunciation corresponds very little to orthography; I would avoid the terms "long A" and "long E" entirely.

Following Wiktionary: in AmE, air is /ɛɹ/ and ear is /iɹ/ (though in either word the /ɹ/ can be replaced with /ɚ/, creating a diphthong). Both contain r-colored vowels; the former has an open-mid vowel, the latter a close vowel sound.

alphabet
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    Wiktionary gives *one* way of pronouncing them. But the range of r-controlled vowels in American English is wider than the range of other vowels, so lots of Americans pronounce them differently. Air can be /ɛɹ/ or /eɹ/ or in-between, and ear can be /ɪɹ/ or /iɹ/ or in-between. – Peter Shor Feb 18 '23 at 20:45
  • @PeterShor "Air" as /eɹ/ I can understand, but where do people say "ear" as /ɪɹ/? – alphabet Feb 18 '23 at 21:49
  • I believe a close examination of how people here and there actually say *ear* should hold the answer to your question to Peter. Those are all /iɹ/ ᴘʜᴏɴᴇᴍɪᴄᴀʟʟʏ, despite the myriad things in ᴘʜᴏɴᴇᴛɪᴄ square brackets, including [ëˑə], [eˑɹ̩], [e̞ˑɹ̩], [iˑɐ], [iˑɐ̠ɾ̥], [iˑɐʁ̞], [iˑɐʐ̥], [iˑə], [iˑəɹ], [iˑəz̠], [iˑɛ̈], [iˑɚ], [iˑɜ], [iˑɹ], [iˑɹ̩], [iɐ], [i̞ə̟], [iəɹ], [iɛ̈ˑ], [iɹ], [ɪˑə], [ɪ̞ˑə], [ɪˑɜ̠], [ɪˑɹ̩], [ɪɜˑɹ], [jœ̈ː]. Those are the *real sounds* actually used for ear, something no non-specialist dictionary ᴇᴠᴇʀ shows. – tchrist Feb 18 '23 at 22:38
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    @tchrist Instead of "pronouncing 'air' as /eɹ/," should one really say "pronouncing 'air' with the same sounds elsewhere used to realize the phonemes /eɹ/"? That's tricky because I'm not sure /eɹ/ is universally considered a separate English phoneme. – alphabet Feb 18 '23 at 23:10
  • Certainly /eɹ/ would be two phonemes, not one. :) – tchrist Feb 18 '23 at 23:15
  • @tchrist I just mean more generally: how should one express the idea of "pronouncing one phoneme as another" or "pronouncing a word with different phonemes," given that most of us can't really hear (or understand) the precise phonetic-level differences you list? (This should probably be a question on the Meta site.) – alphabet Feb 18 '23 at 23:18
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    -eer vowel (accent/dialect variation?) on ELL discusses /ɪɹ/ vs /iɹ/ or [ɪɹ] vs [iɹ] – herisson Feb 18 '23 at 23:27
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This is a favourite topic of mine but I haven’t got the facility at the moment to incorporate the phonetic symbols which explains it better. They are quite well known. Personally I see there are three types of vowel sounds - one is the LONG vowel sounds, the second is the SHORT vowel sounds and the third I call the AR (from the letter R) vowel sounds.

There are six AR vowel sounds namely AR (as in TAR), AIR (as in TARE), EAR (as in TIER), OR (as in TOR), ER (as in STIR) and UER (as in TOUR).

Three of them are pure vowels and three diphthongs which mixes people up a bit. I just remember them as “tar, tare, tier, tor, ter and tour”, not necessarily in that order.

Patrick Corliss
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  • I must recommend this professor's video, with the small caveat that "linking R" or "controlled by R" makes no sense except in dialects that drop their Rs otherwise. – tchrist Sep 22 '22 at 02:12
  • This split into three pure vowels and three diphthongs only really exists in (some varieties of) British English. American English works differently. – Peter Shor Feb 18 '23 at 20:49
  • It's also regional; as was recently discussed in another thread, some people from the Eastern US pronounce "tour" and "tore" identically, despite having the "tour" sound in other words. – alphabet Feb 18 '23 at 23:13