Do the acute-accent-e and grave-accent-e sounds exist in English?

Asked Dec 21 '22 at 15:51

Active Dec 21 '22 at 16:53

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The two sounds 'é' and 'è' are abundant in French. The sound 'ê' is also common enough.

Suppose you're teaching the e accent aigu (é) or e accent grave to an English speaker (from any continent). You can correct them by mentioning that the schwa in (a)go and the long-e in rec(ei)ve are unsuitable approximations, but it would be even better if you pointed out to words where an English speaker already pronounces the two (three) accented French e's.

Do the acute-accent-e and grave-accent-e sounds exist in English?

Update (following Sir Cornflakes' comments):

As described here:

'é' is in mace.
'è' is in best.

Yet, neither sound is listed here. What am I missing?

edited Dec 21 '22 at 16:11

asked Dec 21 '22 at 15:51

Sam7919

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Pronunciation_respelling_key – Sir Cornflakes Dec 21 '22 at 16:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/French – Sir Cornflakes Dec 21 '22 at 16:03
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@SirCornflakes: I don't see how that suggestion is of any help at all. Sam is asking for English words that exemplify the French vowel sounds. – Colin Fine Dec 21 '22 at 16:05
My second comment has them. – Sir Cornflakes Dec 21 '22 at 16:05
Du site StackExchange de la langue française : Pourquoi les anglophones remplacent-ils le phonème /ɛ/ par /e/ si souvent? – Michaelyus Dec 22 '22 at 16:26
@Michaelyus Merci, même si ça me fait un peu mal à l'oreille rien qu'à le lire. – Sam7919 Dec 23 '22 at 19:40

3 Answers3

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If you look at [e] and [ɛ] (which are the IPA representations of the two vowels you're asking about) you'll see a list of English words that approximate to them in particular accents.

The vowel [ɛ] occurs in quite a lot of English accents, but [e] simply doesn't occur in standard American or English varieties, except in the diphthong [eɪ].

answered Dec 21 '22 at 16:13

Colin Fine

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You are missing the fact that the respelling you link is indexed by IPA symbols, which may represent phonemes or phones, while "è" and "é" are no such things, but simply letters specific to the French alphabet (and Italian, but that's irrelevant).

Just look for /ɛ/ and /e/ instead, and you'll get much closer, although /e/ isn't normally considered to exist on its own in typical English phonology.

answered Dec 21 '22 at 16:53

LjL

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I (think I) see. So we cannot say that 'é' is a phoneme, not even when we are talking about a particular French accent or even a specific speaker, because it ultimately does not convey a phoneme. Even in French, we would need to specify the phoneme first (as the two other answers, and the present one, have done), and only then seek their English equivalents. Is that right? – Sam7919 Dec 21 '22 at 16:55
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As far as I know, the sound that "é" makes is pretty much a phoneme in French, in that it always corresponds to /e/. But I'm not a French speakers. The problem is that even though it corresponds to a phoneme, it's not a standard way to write that phoneme, except in French, Italian and maybe some other languages. The IPA symbol /e/, however, is, and likewise with "è", which represents the phoneme that you write in IPA as /ɛ/. Also, "è" and "é" happen to be always (?) the same phonemes, but that's not true of many other letters or digraphs in French: IPA overcomes that. – LjL Dec 21 '22 at 21:34
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You often have to distinguish between phonemes (often written in IPA /between these brackets/) and phones (written [between these brackets]). You can only be confident that an IPA symbols correspond to the same physical sound in two different languages if you're dealing with phones, not phonemes. But in this case, even if the Wikipedia pages given list phonemes, not phones, they are usually a decent enough approximation to let you find a correspondence between English and French. Just remember that you'll see things like /eɪ/ in English, but some speakers will say [ɛɪ] for example. – LjL Dec 21 '22 at 21:40

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There are two ways to look at sounds in a language. One is in terms of the higher-level abstraction the "phoneme", which refers to the system of differences, for example in English /p/ is different from /b/, and /p/ is different from /t/, but /p/ is not different from /pʰ/ nor from /p̚/. All of the phonemes of French are in French, and are not in English, and vice versa. The "phonemes of a language" exist only in that language.

The second is in terms of physical realization. In English there are a number of differences in realization of /p/. The International Phonetic Alphabet is one scheme devised to allow us to talk about sameness at the physical level, so that we could talk of English as having physical [pʰ p p̚] – "allophones" (of the phoneme /p/). Even then, [pʰ] in English is not physically the same as [pʰ] in Hindi.

The French spelling [é] vs. [è] is an orthographic device that roughly conveys the phonetic difference defined in IPA as [e] versus [ɛ], but as in most cross-linguistic phonetic comparisons, the things covered by such a phonemic distinction are only roughly comparable. The phonological status of the vowel pairs is completely different in the two languages, and the physical pronunciation is very different. Of course, both French and English are sociolinguistically big languages, and one cannot get away with talking about "English" and "French" given the many dialects that exist. In some dialects of English (not my dialect), "gate" has a vowel very similar to Parisian [é], and "get" has a vowel very similar to Parisian [è]. In my dialect, the English vowels are more like [ɛi] and [ɛ].

In other words, the only sense in which the Parisian French vowels "exist" in English is that some dialects (spoken in the north) have similarly-pronounced vowels. But not identically-pronounced.

answered Dec 21 '22 at 16:33

user6726

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