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Take these French words that exist as well in English:

  • résumé
  • protégé
  • sauté
  • exposé
  • café

The French pronunciation for the é is simply /e/, which exists in English.

So why is the widely accepted English pronunciation /eɪ/, rather than /e/?

Orange Receptacle
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    It's not "botched". They're supposed to be pronounced that way in English. – Hot Licks Apr 24 '18 at 21:29
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    You could strengthen your question by recording these words with the pronunciation you think should be used, and including a link to the recording in the question. – aparente001 Apr 24 '18 at 21:31
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    Closely related: Are there any words in English pronounced with /e/ at the end?, What rules govern uniform mispronounciation of romance languages?, Why is /e/ generally transcribed as 'ay'? – herisson Apr 24 '18 at 21:32
  • @HotLicks I assume by "supposed to", you mean that it's the result of pronouncing it as such for quite a long time. Considering there is no de jure way of pronouncing anything, it could very well be subject to change in the future. – Orange Receptacle Apr 24 '18 at 21:34
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    The /e/ which exists in English is not the same as the /e/ which exists in French. The English phoneme /e/ is invariably diphthongized to [ei] when stressed, as it is in most French borrowings like this. – John Lawler Apr 24 '18 at 21:46
  • @JohnLawler what about /ɪ/ in English, found in the words, "is", "tip", and "quiz". The sound is nearly identical to the French /e/. – Orange Receptacle Apr 24 '18 at 21:50
  • It's lax in English, whereas the French /e/ is tense. Phonemes are never the same from language to language. – John Lawler Apr 24 '18 at 21:51
  • Even if an English speaker is trying to pronounce a French é, they inevitably over-aspirate the é. So, the sound comes out like a in bay, instead of the /e/, with a rush of air. [In France, they write it [e]. [The sound /ɪ/, quiz, minute, is, does not exist in French. That's why French people often (or at first when learning English] say sheep for ship. The cannot distinguish ship and sheep ] The same happens with Spanish: caballero, lots of air released on final vowels. – Lambie Apr 24 '18 at 23:21
  • In Canadian English, that final E sounds more like "ay" than "ee", which is really not very far from the French pronunciation. – Jim MacKenzie Apr 25 '18 at 01:18
  • @OrangeReceptacle lol he might have chosen a bit better wording than "supposed to" .. it did look a bit snarky in writing .. "represents the common (american-?) english pronunciation" might be more accurate. Perhaps one day we will pronounce the Los Angeles like it is in it's native toungue .. but certainly any phonetic spelling of it in an American dictionary would have it very different than the proper Spanish ( amoung other things with an "Oh" in the middle of 'los' and an "hey" where the 'ge' is. – Tom22 Apr 25 '18 at 03:56
  • @JimMacKenzie Not only in Canadian English. That ay [for the French é] sound is not like the French precisely because of over-aspiration. In fact, when English speakers speak French, that's one signal the speaker is an English speaker. – Lambie Apr 25 '18 at 12:51
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    The premise of the question is mistaken. /e/ exists in English but is realized [eɪ] in this context, as @JohnLawler says. – Luke Sawczak Apr 27 '18 at 15:10
  • @PeterShor Bait /bet/, bane /ben/, bear /ber/, and bay /be/ all have the same /e/ in them, whereas bet /bɛt/ has /ɛ/ which is a different phoneme. Those with /e/ become falling diphthongs with a very slight off-glide in open syllables, and for some speakers also in closed ones. But this is a non-phonemic detail that doesn't matter much. People who write [bei] or [beɪ], let alone [beɹ] or [bɛəɹ], are focusing on non-phonemic phonetic elements that happen automatically according to that speaker's phonological rules and which vary very considerably between speech communities. – tchrist Apr 27 '18 at 19:00
  • @tchrist: I suspect that the offglide in open syllables for /ej/ is very audible to French speakers, because it's the difference in pronunciation between, say, abbé (abbot) and abeille (bee). So what you are calling "a very slight off-glide", for French speakers probably sounds like a completely different phoneme. – Peter Shor Apr 27 '18 at 19:08
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    @PeterShor That's the difference between how English and the Germanic languages have a “lax” articulation and French and the other Romance languages have a “tense” articulation in comparison. For them adding an off-glide to a phoneme is a distinct phoneme but for us it is not. The same thing happens with my Spanish minimal pair of estés (that you are/be, subj singular) and estéis (same but plural). There’s a phonemic /ej/ in that second one’s stressed syllable that stands out to a Spanish speaker but which is missed by English speakers, who often say the 1st as though it were the 2nd. – tchrist Apr 27 '18 at 19:14

2 Answers2

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For many speakers, /ɛ/ is not particularly close phonetically to [e]

We can transcribe the vowel phoneme in the word "bed" with /e/, but that doesn't mean it's phonetically identical to the vowel in French "café" etc., any more than the English consonant sound transcribed /t/ is identical to the French consonant sound transcribed /t/. Many English speakers pronounce the vowel in "bed" with a quality closer to [ɛ].

/ɪ/ (in stressed syllables, at least) is not thought of as an "e sound"

You're right that the English vowel phoneme found in words like "tip" and "bid" has a quality near the IPA cardinal vowel [e] for most speakers, but most English speakers don't think of /ɪ/ in stressed syllables as being an "e sound" so they're unlikely to use this vowel in a word where the stressed vowel is spelled with "e" or "é". For comparison, many American English speakers realize the medial consonant in words like writer and letter as something like [ɾ], but few of these speakers use this sound in loanwords as an approximation of the /ɾ/ or /r~ɾ/ sound of foreign languages.

There are also phonotactic explanations for why English speakers don't use /ɛ/ or /ɪ/ in the words that you list.

Phonotactic restrictions on /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ in word-final position

American English speakers tend to put the primary stress on the last syllable in loanwords from French, and stressed word-final syllables ending in /ɛ/ or /ɪ/ do not occur in native English vocabulary.

British English speakers are more inclined to place the stress earlier in loanwords from French, but unstressed word-final syllables ending in /ɛ/ also do not occur in native English vocabulary, and unstressed word-final syllables ending in /ɪ/ are only found (in words like happy, valley, taxi) in particular accents of English that I think have become fairly uncommon.

I think it's actually not particularly difficult for an English speaker to pronounce these sounds in this context (e.g., the slang word "meh" is pronounced /mɛ/) but it's not something that English speakers will tend to do without explicit effort.

In contrast, stressed word-final syllables ending in /eɪ/ do occur in native English vocabulary; e.g. in away, today and in a number of monosyllabic words like way, say, may, hay, gray, lay.

It's a bit less clear whether unstressed word-final syllables ending in /eɪ/ exist in native English vocabulary, but many speakers have /eɪ/ in the weekday names Monday, Tuesday, etc. (these could be considered to have secondary stress on the last syllable). Other speakers have a reduced vowel /i/ or /ɪ/ in this context; I give some further examples of the reduction of unstressed /eɪ/ to the "happy" vowel in my answer to Which English words feature reduction of diphthongs like /eɪ/ to /i/?

/eɪ/ is the established sound, and sounds "French" to English speakers

The English phoneme /eɪ/ has become established as the conventional equivalent to French /e/ (as well as word-final French /ɛ/, as in "ballet", and in some cases even word-medial French /ɛ(ː)/, as in "crêpe" and "fête"), and has furthermore become established as the vowel sound used in each of the particular words that you mention, so that's what people use.

Two words with unexpected pronunciation variants provide evidence that the use of /eɪ/ in English is not particularly closely related to the way a word sounds in French. The last syllable of the word word repartee, from French repartie, is fairly often pronounced /ˈteɪ/ in American English. Likewise, the last syllable of the word lingerie is often pronounced /ˈreɪ/ in American English. As far as I know, these pronunciations can't really be explained as any kind of attempt to approximate the actual pronunciations of the original French words; rather, they indicate that the use of /eɪ/ in the final syllable of words from French is an established convention in English (that might be vaguely related to what English speakers think French sounds like, but is not really related to what French actually sounds like).

Community
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herisson
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  • I agree that é is pronounced /eɪ/ in English. But not that /ɪ/ as in tip and minute [both the i and u] has a "quality near" [e] as as in bed. I mean: bed//bid are completely different. – Lambie Apr 24 '18 at 23:37
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    @Lambie: I said that the English “short i” phoneme has a quality similar to the IPA cardinal vowel [e] (note the square brackets), not that it has a quality similar to that of the English vowel phoneme found in words like “bed”. I’ll edit to clarify. – herisson Apr 24 '18 at 23:54
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    @Lambie Bed and bid are pretty close. See the pin-pen merger. – Mitch Apr 25 '18 at 01:32
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    Anybody who writes /bed/ for /bɛd/ is just being confusing. – tchrist Apr 25 '18 at 03:01
  • @Lambie There's something of a "consent reality" where British transcribers use /eɪ/ for the English sound whether this makes sense or not. Compare the Spanish estés versus estéis, and ask yourself which one’s stressed syllable has the vowel from English café. It’s the first one, not the second one. There’s a very tiny bit of drop-off for the closing glide, but it’s not phonemic and it’s nothing at all like estéis, which is both of those things. – tchrist Apr 25 '18 at 03:07
  • @tchrist If using /eɪ/ doesn't make sense, what would? To use /e/ when transcribing English is ambiguous: the writer might have meant FACE but neglected to indicate the glide, or might have meant DRESS but used a wrong symbol. – Rosie F Apr 25 '18 at 05:58
  • Bed and bid contain a minimal pair. I have no issue with /eɪ/ being used for exposé, the é. – Lambie Apr 25 '18 at 12:48
  • @Mitch: bed, bid aren’t subject to the pin-pen merger. – KarlG Apr 26 '18 at 12:22
  • @KarlG Really? Why not? It's the same vowel pair, right? – Mitch Apr 26 '18 at 12:29
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    @Mitch: The merger is only before nasals. him/hem, bin/Ben, but not pit/pet, bid/bed. – KarlG Apr 26 '18 at 13:21
  • @KarlG OK, yes, I didn't know that. But I was addressing Lambie's statement that bed and bid are completely different, and the pin-pen merger shows that even if bid and bed don't merge, the vowels are very close. The pin-pen merger says in some varieties of Irish English and in Newfoundland aren't limited to nasals. – Mitch Apr 26 '18 at 13:26
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    @Lambie: You've got it wrong. /e/ is not pronounced /eɪ/in English. It's pronounced [ei], with square brackets, not slashes. Phonemes are unique to a particular language and appear with slashes; phones are universal and apply to any language, but they appear with square brackets. "/eɪ/" doesn't mean anything, and defeats the phonemic principle. – John Lawler Apr 27 '18 at 18:15
  • I have a ""two things"" dyslexia, OK? This is what I mean. In the French language, é sound is written IPA style [e] or /e/ for the phoneme in French: "le e fermé". And English speakers in English, pronounce the French é [e] as the dipthong vowel: [eɪ] as in bay because they cannot pronounce the French é without aspirating it. Also, that minimal pairs: bid and bed are differentiated in English and not by Spanish and French speakers when they speak English. – Lambie Apr 28 '18 at 00:01
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Let's consider a comparable example in French. Why is the English word brunch pronounced /bʁœ̃ʃ/ with a nasal vowel, when there are lots of words pronounced with /n/ in French? Because whenever /n/ comes after a vowel and before a consonant, it is absorbed into the vowel, making it nasal.

The case of words ending with /e/ in English is similar. In English, /e/ and /eɪ/ are allophones, meaning they represent the same underlying phoneme, and /eɪ/ is always used at the end of the word. So the pronunciation /rezume/ is impossible in English, just like the pronunciation /brynʃ/ is impossible in French.

In French, a /j/ at the end of a word is phonemic; for example, vais (/vɛ/) and veille (/vɛj/) are two different words where the only difference is the /j/ at the end of veille. So when English speakers say sauté, French speakers hear sauteille, which would be a completely different word in French (if it existed).

Peter Shor
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    Here, brunch's pronunciation is listed as /bʁœntʃ/. So, there are definitely multiple acceptable ways of uttering this word in French. – Orange Receptacle May 04 '18 at 18:18
  • @Orange Receptacle: Strange – the English version of Wiktionary says /bʁœ̃ʃ/, while the French version is much closer to the English pronunciation. – Peter Shor May 04 '18 at 18:33
  • As Orange Receptacle's comment indicates, vowel + nasal consonant + oral consonant sequences may not be the best example of something that is phonologically impossible in French. It's true that historically, these sequences were lost in native French words because they developed to sequences of nasal vowel + oral consonant.... – herisson May 04 '18 at 20:30
  • But if we assume that the phonetic loss of schwa in various contexts in many modern French varieties also reflects a phonological elision/loss of a vowel segment, then we can say that new nasal consonant + oral consonant sequences have arisen in words like "ancienneté" (which the WordReference dictionary transcribes as "/ɑ̃sjɛnte/"). – herisson May 04 '18 at 20:30
  • And nasal consonant + oral consonant sequences also seem to be quite possible in French in the pronunciation (or at least, in the standard prescribed pronunciation in France) of a number of loanwords or foreign words or names (I don't know enough to say what the typical colloquial pronunciations of such words or names may be). Perhaps a clearer example of systematic adjustment of phonemes in loanwords to match French phonology would be the French tendency to adopt English /ɪ/ as French /i/. – herisson May 04 '18 at 20:32
  • @sumelic: in ancienneté, you could argue that the /n/ and the /t/ are in separate syllables, so the restriction doesn't apply. (But Orange Receptacle is undoubtedly right in that some French speakers pronounce brunch with the English /œntʃ/. On the other hand, not all French speakers do.) – Peter Shor May 05 '18 at 01:16
  • I think I spontaneously say /bʁœnʃ/ but /bʁœ̃nʃ/ or /bʁœ̃ʃ/ wouldn't surprise me. I come from a part of France where /œ̃/ is theoretically known to exist but not really distinguished from /ɛ̃/. Regarding the /n/, I think most speakers would put a “weak” /n/ that's barely perceptible between the nasal vowel and the /ʃ/ sound. I don't believe in /ntʃ/ from a French person speaking French, that's far too many consonants to put at the end of a syllable and French doesn't even have /tʃ/ natively except in the sneeze onomatopoeia. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 24 '18 at 00:27