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Words beginning with e usually be pronounced as /e/ or /ɪ /, for example:

  • egg /eg/
  • effort /'efət/
  • explicit /ɪ k'splɪ sɪ t/

Very rarely, words are pronounced with /iː/, for example:

  • epoch /'i:pɔk/
  • ego /'i:ɡəu/

My question is in which situation, the word begin with e will be pronounced as /iː/?

Community
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Ryan Lyu
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  • It could also be a short i sound and the schwa sound. there are no rules, you have to check the dictionary each time. – David Haim Oct 17 '18 at 08:58
  • Hi Ryan, I'm pretty sure I've seen something like this question on our sister site [ell.se] - it might be worth visiting (NB it's not just for learners, it has great explanations even for native speakers!). Try selecting "tags" on the main menu and searching for "pronunciation". :-) – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Oct 17 '18 at 09:23
  • @Araucaria: Is there? I feel like several rules, none of them very good, are needed to fully explain the examples in the question. The role of stress is probably the simplest part to explain, but even that is fairly complicated since some American English speakers might use /ə/ or /ɛ/ instead of /ɪ/ in a word like excel. – herisson Oct 17 '18 at 09:37
  • @Araucaria: I guess I may have been too pessimistic in my initial decision to ignore the "word-initial" part of the question. My first thought was that it wasn't really relevant to the phonology of English vowels, but I guess for historical reasons there might be some generalizations that can be made about word-initial E in particular. There still are a number of rules needed though to account for all the various pronunciations of initial E in words like edit, economy, express, epic, echo, ethics, ethos, ethane, effective... – herisson Oct 17 '18 at 09:46
  • @sumelic But the Q's about when word-initial E is /i:/, not when it' any of the other more open vowels. I was way overtstating when I said rule there (I meant there are helpful and useful things to say). E.g. one example is that many of those words are from Greek - and as you say have word initial stress. There are also useful spelling rules which rule things out etc. – Araucaria - Him Oct 17 '18 at 09:47
  • @sumelic Sorry, I had to edit my comment there, to make it vaguely accurate :) – Araucaria - Him Oct 17 '18 at 09:48
  • @sumelic Yep, and there's various other problems too, such as there's different pronunciations for some of those (in some cases, I beleieve, there's a pond division. So for example, ethos and ethane have /i:/ in British English.) Actually, I take it back, it's a car-crash. – Araucaria - Him Oct 17 '18 at 09:51
  • @Araucaria Americans are more inclined to sound an "I" at the start of a word, whereas in Britain we don't. Iraq and Iran are pronounced "eye rack" and "eye ran" by Americans. Is that what you were thinking of? Other vowels get similar treatment such a "yoo-gurt", whilst we say "yog-urt". I'm trying to think of an instance which involves "e". Yes don't you say "ee - volve" to our "ev-olve"? – WS2 Oct 17 '18 at 11:42
  • @WS2 Wrong side of the pond! The US-ers often have a SET vowel at the beginnings of words such as ethane or ethos or epoch, where we Blighty folk would be more likely to have a FLEECE vowel (SET=vowel we use in set, FLECE=vowel we use in fleece) – Araucaria - Him Oct 23 '18 at 19:44

2 Answers2

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There's no simple way to predict this. The letter E is one of the most problematic letters in the English spelling system. In fact, a fairly large number of words spelled with E can be pronounced with either /iː/ or /ɛ/, showing that even native speakers don't follow any single pattern for pronouncing words spelled with this letter. The word epoch is one such word: it in fact has the pronunciations /ˈɛpɒk/ and /ˈɛpək/ in addition to /ˈiːpɒk/.

There is also variation between /iː/ and /ɛ/ in words like economic and evolution (the pronunciation of evolution with /iː/ is more common in British English than in American English).

You can sort of explain some of these things, but not in any way that's really useful for predicting the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. For example, ego is the Latin word for "I", and the use of /iː/ in the first syllable is consistent with a traditional rule for English pronunciation saying that a vowel letter in a Latin word is pronounced "long" (like the letter-name) in a stressed open penultimate syllable (a second-to-last syllable that ends in a vowel—following Latin syllabification rules).

In violation of that rule, the first syllable of the word era (from Latin aera) is often pronounced with a "short E" sound in American English (or the corresponding R-colored vowel, anyway: many American English accents merge some or all of the "short E", "short A" and "long A" sounds before an R sound).

Of course, the pronunciation /iː/ is quite common for words that start with E when the vowel is part of a digraph EA or EE, as in each or eel, but I assume you aren't asking about words spelled with digraphs like this.

herisson
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  • " even native speakers are uncertain about this part of English spelling/pronunciation" <-- No, we're not! There's just several ways to say them! :-) – Araucaria - Him Oct 17 '18 at 10:25
  • @Araucaria: Hmm. I guess I'm thinking partly of the situation of a native speaker who is encountering an unfamiliar vocabulary item for the first time in writing. It doesn't seem too implausible to me that some people might see the word epoch before hearing it. – herisson Oct 17 '18 at 10:27
  • Last comment, one thing you can use (i.e. are stressedully say is that all of these words have word-initial stress. (are stressed on the E) – Araucaria - Him Oct 17 '18 at 10:28
  • Ah, I'd clarify that, because it could give the impression that there's a "right way" to say those words in which there's variation, :) Ciao! – Araucaria - Him Oct 17 '18 at 10:32
  • @Araucaria: I think though that some speakers might have /i(ː)/ in words like economy and ecology, and I don't know of any reason to say that these pronunciations have any stress on the initial syllable aside from the circular argument that they lack vowel reduction. (It's also known to occur, infrequently, even in certain words with double-consonant spellings such as effective--compare perhaps the pronunciation of dissection/dissect with a diphthong in the first syllable.) That's why I'm not sure whether I should say that /i(ː)/ should not be expected in unstressed syllables. – herisson Oct 17 '18 at 10:32
  • And in American English, there are also spelling variants like Eolian or Eonian where the E comes before a vowel, and so is pronounced as /i/ even though it is unstressed. That's regular, but I don't know if it's worth mentioning the special behavior of vowels in hiatus. – herisson Oct 17 '18 at 10:35
  • Um, the word (a)eolian (as in the Aeolian musical mode) is often pronounced /eɪˈoʊliən/ so that it starts with the same vowel that the name Abraham does. I’ve never even heard it with the vowel of eel. – tchrist Oct 18 '18 at 02:08
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There a several competing forces in operation with these words. One is etymology: words that come form Latin or Greek ae or oe forms might retain a long vowel sound reflecting that history. Another competing force is that people just see the letters and pronounce them how they would pronounce those letters in any other word (the speak as you read principle). A further force is that even amongst those who know and care about Latin or (ancient) Greek derivations the way Latin or (ancient )Greek is pronounced in (British) English has changed but some of the words retain pronunciation from a previous version of the English pronunciation of Latin or Greek. A good example would be the usual pronunciation of 'chemotherapy' which is quite different from the usual pronunciation of 'chemical' despite their obvious common origin.

JeremyC
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