lone vowel sounds across the globe

[Christopher Sundita]

Hi Samuel,

Usually, when you deal with phonetics/phonology, the orthography of a language is irrelevant. So, yes, the names of five vowels in English are different than the way other languages pronounce them and this is because of sound changes that happened in English over the centuries.

However, English has a plethora of monophthongs and diphthongs (and triphthongs!) depending on the accent.  And I know that in my accent (mostly west coast US with traces of east coast US & Filipino), at least, there are approximations of how to pronounce them. Even though I say the name of the letter <a> as a diphthong, I do pronounce /a/ in some words like <dot> [dat].   Ditto for French, which has /u/, /e/, and /E/.

With regards to Austronesian languages since, I'd like to point out that Tagalog has been using the English pronunciation of the alphabet since 1987.

Also, if you're curious about how other languages pronounce their Latin-based alphabet, you can check out, for a start: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/languages.htm#latin

Hope this helps,

--Chris Sundita
University of Washington, Seattle

On Tue, 13 Jul 2010, Samuel Martin wrote:

> I'm under the impression that English is quite fussy in its pronunciation
> of *a, e, i, o* and *u* and I'm hoping someone can open my horizons. I'm
> only referring to the pronunciation of these vowels on their own, as when
> you say the alphabet. As far as I know, these vowels are monophthongs in the
> overwhelming majority of languages, yet in the English pronunciation many of
> them are diphthongs (i and u for all anglophone countries at the very least)
>
> French also pronounces *e* and *u* differently than most languages; as [ə]
> and [y], respectively.
>
> Is anyone aware of other languages except French and English who don't
> adhere to the IPA [a] [e] [i] [o] [u] when simply speaking these vowels
> sounds on their own?



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