I think because that is the closest approximate sound to the American a that Germans have in their language and the rest is the influence of their first language on their pronunciation pattern
Listen to an American say the words BigMac, Apple, iPad, Bat etc., these sound much much much closer to an a than an ä. They sound absolutely nothing like the German versions of these words.
In some words it can get a bit closer to an ä, when it's followed by a nasal sound, like in man or dance. But that's a much rarer case than the aforementioned one.
A while back I watched a German cinema show where people talked about a movie called "Kevin in the woods". All of the people involved knew it, and I had never heard of it. Until I realised that they meant CABIN in the woods. And Amercians certainly don't pronounce this Cebin or Cäbin.
Because that's how they hear it, and that's the closest they can get to pronouncing it.
Every language has a library of sounds that it uses, called its "phonology", and they don't usually match perfectly.
Here are two charts: one showing [the vowel sounds in standard German](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Northern_Standard_German_vowel_chart.svg/880px-Northern_Standard_German_vowel_chart.svg.png), and one showing [the vowel sounds in Californian English](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/California_English_vowel_chart.svg/1200px-California_English_vowel_chart.svg.png).
The chart represents the mouth, with the lips to the left, and the vowels written to indicate the tongue position, with their symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The American "a" in "hat" is at the bottom left (tongue lowered and pushed forwards), with the symbol /æ/.
If you compare that with the German chart, you'll see there is no /æ/ sound in German. The nearest sounds are /a/ and /ɛ/.
So when a German has to say a word like "man", they don't have /æ/ available. They could of course go for /a/, but to them /æ/ sounds closer to /ɛ/, and that happens to be the sound represented by "ä".
The basic concept of the vowel chart is quite simple. It vaguely represents the position of your tongue in your mouth. Closed vowels are at the top, like English ee (German i) and oo (German u). Sounds that are made close to the teeth are on the left of the diagram (like ee and a in hat). Vowels that are open (a in hat and father) are at the bottom. You might have guessed it, the sounds for father and oo are at the right side of the chart.
Most positions on the chart have two vowels. An unrounded and a rounded version. An example would be German i and ü. Start of by gliding from German u to i paying attention to your tongue. If you made that sound a few times keep the lips in the exact same position you start from and move your tongue to the i position. You now have mastered the ü pronunciation.
Understanding the vowel chart is easy. Making good use of it and being able to say any sound is a lot harder.
If you got some time I can recommend you polymathy on youtube. The channel has a great 40 min video on the vowel chart that goes into a lot more depth and is easier to understand than what I could write in a comment.
There are some cool online courses that introduce you to IPA and transcription, if you are interested in them. [This](https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/online-phonetics-courses-and-tutorials) is a list of ones in English, and [this website](http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/homepages/hackmack/phonmorph/pcuebungen) is particularly cool exercises related to German.
Note also that (Californian) English /ʌ/ is extremely close to German /ɐ/ and not too different from German /a/. Those are often treated as equivalent by German speakers.
Likewise, /ɑ/ is interpreted as the equivalent of long /a:/. So in a way, German /a/ sounds already have different English equivalents, so and therefore /æ/ needs a different equivalent. And since it's a front vowel, it's "clearly" (to me) an ä-like sound.
I sometimes wish those diagrams showed more of a range of the different sounds that "pass" as that phoneme instead of a single point.
phonetic science is so interesting, I also wish that I was an expert in it, maybe I'll also finally understand why arabic speakers in my country orderly switch the letters "P" and "B". they do it in a such a regular pattern which baffles me.
Haha. I used to do that when I first started learning German. I can remember some colleagues teasing me for saying the letters of the alphabet as ah, bay, say, day, etc.
The reason why is also the answer to OP's question. The exact sound doesn't exist in our native phonology, so we use what to us sounds like the nearest match.
Eventually, you (hopefully) learn to hear and reproduce the real sound (or at least a better approximation).
I also struggled to hear the difference between eh and äh for many years.
They're objective as they can reasonably be, but even the IPA only has a finite number of symbols. There can be some variation even among native speakers of the same language, or disagreements among linguists over the exact articulation.
Thus the German /ɛ/ may, for some speakers at least, be slightly raised compared with the American English /ɛ/, but not raised enough to turn it into /e/. If you want or need precision, you can use diacritics and say that the standard German realization of /ɛ/ is closer to [ɛ̝].
maybe because this is how books like the Cambridge or Oxford Dictionary say these words are pronounced in American English ?
tbh I keep switching between American and British pronunciation bc here in Germany in school, we usually learn British English (you know, that are those, wo pronounce dance with a long a, not an ä 😉 ), but for the last 2 years of high school, my English teacher was from the States
The letter "a" isn't pronounced very consistently within the anglosphere either... maybe it's this inconsistency and the resulting insecurity of what is the "right" pronounciation, that German English speakers change the a to the closest letter in their own language. You could go and ask the reverse question: Why do American English speakers pronounce the German word "Sonne" with an "-uh" ending and not the proper German way?
makes sense. i find it that speakers of languages with diverse constants and vowels tend to pronounce foreign words better, such as native Arabic speakers.
I was only confused because germans pronounce the English "a" wrong quite consistently (feels intentional if that makes sense), maybe in the 50s out 60s there was a common source of English teaching in Germany which had pronounced the "a" as "ä" even though the British "a" is already present in German. I just think that it's an interesting phonetic phenomena.
This whole class of vowels in English is really super slippery and flexible, and if you listen even to native speakers from NA, you will hear a HUGE range of pronunciations.
I am not sure I get your point about Arabic, though? In terms of the number of phonemic vowels, my understanding was that both German and English actually have a wider vowel inventory than most Arabics, but I could be wrong about this.
the Arabic vowel letters themselves are only a few, but each has multiple versions according to their positions in a word and the type of diacritic that they have.
some English/German vowel sounds however are indeed not present in Arabic and can be problematic for Arabic speakers.
I also agree that there are many different English accents, but the "ä" sound in ex:"breaking bäd" sounds odd to me because it resembles that of a specific type of African American accent (and only one type of African American accent). which means that it's not the most spoken accent, it feels like an odd choice of an accent for German speakers.
>the Arabic vowel letters themselves are only a few, but each has multiple versions according to their positions in a word and the type of diacritic that they have.
That is totally true, and I don't mean the number of vowel letters, but rather the number of distinct vowel sounds that are meaning bearing (i.e., where an alternate pronunciation can potentially change the meaning of the word). English has something like 20 of these vowel sounds, German--depending on how you count--has between 16 and 22, and most Arabics something like 12.
For a cool visual representation of this phenomenon, you can google something called "vowel charts" or "vowel diagrams", which show the variety of vowel sounds in a given language with respect to where they are formed in the mouth.
> i find it that speakers of languages with diverse constants and vowels tend to pronounce foreign words better, such as native Arabic speakers.
Not really. Every language has its quirks, very special to that langauge, and whether you can pronounce them well or not so well mainly, or only rather, depends on how well you have practiced it. A lot of people just repeat what the teacher says, who also might have an accent, and they copy it only somewhat close, but not perfectly. If you really want to speak accent free, you have to lot quite some effort into pronunciation, and meticulously go through every sound, identify your fails and work on them. For most people, that is just unnecessary effort, they better put their time and energy into learning grammar and vocabulary, because usually some accent is totally ok. Only if you work on stage or as a spy you might want to really weed out your accent. But the native language is not really a help, because even if you have a sound tha tis very similar to the sound in the foreign langauge, it will still only be similar, but not quite the same. So either you just copy it and live with the accent, or you really work out the little nuances, but that takes its time, regardless what language you're coming from.
I didn't say that they would pronounce them perfectly, I'm only saying that they have a more diverse phonetic library.
also didn't mean to offend anyone in case someone took it that way, all languages are beautiful
nah, I didn't understand it as offense, no prob ;)
But still, diverse does not mean that it civers all sounds of a different language completely, so you have to learn soemthign new anyway. And if you have no similar sound in your language at all, you might even get closer to the original, because you're not distracted by what you're already used to. OP's question is a good exampe for that, Germans say "ä" for English "a" because our ä is very similar to it and close enough, so we just reuse that. It is not exactly there, just close enough to not bother with it anymore, but different enough to be identified as German as soon as we open our mouth. I think if I learned Xhosa and had to practice the click sound there, it would take a while, but I'd probably get it more correctly than if German had a quite similar sound already.
>even though the British "a" is already present in German.
Well yeah but not the one in "bad". I mean we don't say "fäther" either. According to the IPA, the a in "bad" is an [æ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_front_unrounded_vowel) which is a sound that does not exist in german. And to me it sounds much more like an ä than a german a.
I guess it depends on the individual but generally I bet most germans pick up pronounciations from media (films, music, etc) and more comes from the US here than from UK.
I personally have been anglophil all my life and have had german and american english teachers. Apparently, I've picked up a mishmash of accents and now sound like I'm from Cork lol
I am not sure what you mean with 'ä' here. In German, short ä sounds exactly the same as short e. "Hätte" could have been spelled "hette". Long ä is different from long e on paper, and in words such as "bä" (the sound a goat makes) it sounds like British "air", but overall "wäre" sounds like "ware" most of the time.
A basic thing you learn when learning English is that A sounds like E. (and E sounds like I, and I sounds like EI) There may be a difference between the sounds in 'bad' and 'bed' , but that distinction is hard to hear for Germans, so Germans will generally pronounce both as "bet" (or as "bed" if they manage to pronounce a D word-finally). Of course in some words A does not sound like E. You won't pronounce father and car as feather and care. But in words like grass and dance it's confusing. School books may teach you to pronounce an a-sound, but in pop songs you'll hear an e-sound, so overall it's easier to just say gress and dence.
Btw, I'm Dutch and the whole above story goes for us as well. And even more so because we hear American shows and movies in the original language.
You aren’t wrong. I’ve also read advice here that the ‘ä’ is the same as the ‘a’ in ‘apple’ and to use that as a German learner.
I’m a Brit for context, but to me they are very distinct. Saying ‘äppel’ in English is one of the markers of a German accent.
It’s a bit like ‘u’/ ‘ü’ confusion for learners of German. You have to practice it and even then it’s easy to get wrong *even though* an accent such as my English one has both in (not identical, but there are two u sounds I use).
Italian here and we do exactly the same, the closest approximate sound is an open e (as we call it) and therefore most english words which present an æ when speaking in fluent speech are approximated like that. I would go as far as saying that using the correct pronunciation used in the source language when using loanwords is ironically incorrect and make harder to understand what you're talking about.
The reason has nothing to do with different varieties of English, but rather because most Germans simply do not learn how to correctly pronounce the English "a" sound in school, and even more are not aware of the problem. Many are formally taught, incorrectly, that the English "a" sound resembles the German ä sound. This is why so many native German speakers are unable to differentiate between words such as "beg", "bag", "back", or "bake". It all ends up sounding like "beck". Unfortunately, it is very difficult for people to unlearn something that they have already learned incorrectly, even if they are aware of the problem.
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this, i sense opposition from some of the comments/dislikes, although i didn't mean the question in a negative condescending way, I realize that all speakers in the world have some sort of accent when they speak a second language.
Same reason English speakers pronounce final 'e's as /ei/ when speaking Spanish, french or Italian.
When a sound doesn't have a straight analogue in the language, speakers usually overcorrect to the side of the more familiar sound. Unless you learned it early in your life or did a lot of pronunciation training
*Bad* and *bed*, *man* and *men* = to most of my countrymen, all of them have the same vowel, something like the British English vowel in *bed*, which is more or less the same sound we use in *Bett*.
Many do not hear the difference, at least not, when the words are isolated. It is hardly possible to miss the difference when someone slowly says "*bad bed bat bet*", but otherwise it is hard for us to notice.
And it is even harder to consistently produce the correct vowel sound, even if you are conscious that there is a difference.
In addition, there is this difference between British English and American English, where words like *chance*, *dance*, *grass* can have the sound of *father* or of *bad*. Here, many Germans, influence by Pop Music or whatever, use the American sound but (see above) narrowly miss it.
I don't think the British say "bad" differently to Americans. For words like "grass" and "dance", some Englishmen will lengthen it to "graaaaws" (Ed Sheeran - Perfect for an example of this). But never with "bad".
It's an accurate rendition of the sound.
Historical note: Old English didn't have the letter A. Instead the used the AE digraph. The modern English A is just a misspelling of that.
I'm very confused by this post - that is how these words are pronounced in a generic american accent. Which accent are you thinking about where the american "a" is not pronounced like "ä"?
>Which accent are you thinking about where the american "a" is not pronounced like "ä"?
All of them. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
There is absolutely nowhere in America where "bad" and "bed" rhyme.
I never said they did...? The "a" in "bad" is pronounced like "ä". The "e" in "bed" is pronounced like the "e" in "Ed", as in the name. That... still doesn't change the fact that the OP makes no sense. The "a" in "bad" remains pronounced like the "ä".
Edit: I'm not a native speaker, and certainly can't natively speak in american or english accents, but I know how they are pronounced for the most part.
>The "a" in "bad" is pronounced like "ä"
No, it's not. It's either /a/ (like the German a) or /ae/.
>The "e" in "bed" is pronounced like the "e" in "Ed",
The German ä is pronounced as either /ɛ/ or /e/ depending on the accent. The English e is pronounced as... either either /ɛ/ or /e/, depending on the accent.
I think it is a bit more messy than this, to be honest--[this stackexchange post](https://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-%C9%9B-%C3%A6-merger-happening-in-many-of-the-English-dialects) seems on target to me.
You're citing certain dialects in very specific cases. It's nowhere near the norm in America, or anywhere else for that matter, and *none* of those you listed would say "bed" and "bad" the same.
I could justify saying a lot of things wrong in German if I pointed to 10 different dialects (which I don't speak) that said things the way I do in particular cases. It wouldn't make it any less wrong when I'm trying to speak in a non-regional Standard German accent.
I know! I didn't say you were wrong--I just said it is more messy!
Also, I think that the (very widespread, in many dialects) /æ/ raising phenomenon really messes with how this vowel sound works in English, and accounts for the very frequent /ɛ/ that people feel they hear with what "should" be an /æ/--that is all.
>You're seriously arguing that the german "ä" is not pronounced as /ae/ ?
It isn't lol. Check any dictionary.
>you're not a native speaker
Native speakers natively know how to *speak*, not the IPA representations of *how* they speak.
I am a native speaker of English though, and I can tell you no one ever says "bad" like "bäd". Not in America, not in Australia, not in the UK, nowhere.
Eh, it honestly doesn't matter. You're right on the pronunciation according to the IPA for æ and ɛː between the "a" in "bad" and "ä". But looking through tutorials on mastering the different pronunciations between ɛː and æ just turns up a lot of confused *native english* speakers that cannot tell or pronounce the difference. And if there's enough native english speakers who can't tell the difference, then I stand by my statement that OP doesn't have a point.
>But looking through tutorials on mastering the different pronunciations between ɛː and æ just turns up a lot of confused native english speakers
Gonna need a source for this. The long ä can sound like "ay" (/ei/) to us, but idk anyone who'd mistake it for /ae/ as in bad. There's also again the implication here that people are mixing up "bed" and "bad", which again is totally ridiculous.
>then I stand by my statement that OP doesn't have a point.
"OP must be lying about what he and hundreds of millions of other English speaker hear because I can't tell the difference."
> "OP must be lying about what he and hundreds of millions of other English speaker hear because I can't tell the difference."
Source for this claim of mine?
I think because that is the closest approximate sound to the American a that Germans have in their language and the rest is the influence of their first language on their pronunciation pattern
Yup that's called an accent. 😀
Bingo 👈😎👈
Listen to an American say the words BigMac, Apple, iPad, Bat etc., these sound much much much closer to an a than an ä. They sound absolutely nothing like the German versions of these words. In some words it can get a bit closer to an ä, when it's followed by a nasal sound, like in man or dance. But that's a much rarer case than the aforementioned one. A while back I watched a German cinema show where people talked about a movie called "Kevin in the woods". All of the people involved knew it, and I had never heard of it. Until I realised that they meant CABIN in the woods. And Amercians certainly don't pronounce this Cebin or Cäbin.
Because that's how they hear it, and that's the closest they can get to pronouncing it. Every language has a library of sounds that it uses, called its "phonology", and they don't usually match perfectly. Here are two charts: one showing [the vowel sounds in standard German](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Northern_Standard_German_vowel_chart.svg/880px-Northern_Standard_German_vowel_chart.svg.png), and one showing [the vowel sounds in Californian English](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/California_English_vowel_chart.svg/1200px-California_English_vowel_chart.svg.png). The chart represents the mouth, with the lips to the left, and the vowels written to indicate the tongue position, with their symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The American "a" in "hat" is at the bottom left (tongue lowered and pushed forwards), with the symbol /æ/. If you compare that with the German chart, you'll see there is no /æ/ sound in German. The nearest sounds are /a/ and /ɛ/. So when a German has to say a word like "man", they don't have /æ/ available. They could of course go for /a/, but to them /æ/ sounds closer to /ɛ/, and that happens to be the sound represented by "ä".
Man, it'd be great if I understood IPA properly.
The basic concept of the vowel chart is quite simple. It vaguely represents the position of your tongue in your mouth. Closed vowels are at the top, like English ee (German i) and oo (German u). Sounds that are made close to the teeth are on the left of the diagram (like ee and a in hat). Vowels that are open (a in hat and father) are at the bottom. You might have guessed it, the sounds for father and oo are at the right side of the chart. Most positions on the chart have two vowels. An unrounded and a rounded version. An example would be German i and ü. Start of by gliding from German u to i paying attention to your tongue. If you made that sound a few times keep the lips in the exact same position you start from and move your tongue to the i position. You now have mastered the ü pronunciation. Understanding the vowel chart is easy. Making good use of it and being able to say any sound is a lot harder. If you got some time I can recommend you polymathy on youtube. The channel has a great 40 min video on the vowel chart that goes into a lot more depth and is easier to understand than what I could write in a comment.
There are some cool online courses that introduce you to IPA and transcription, if you are interested in them. [This](https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/online-phonetics-courses-and-tutorials) is a list of ones in English, and [this website](http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/homepages/hackmack/phonmorph/pcuebungen) is particularly cool exercises related to German.
Note also that (Californian) English /ʌ/ is extremely close to German /ɐ/ and not too different from German /a/. Those are often treated as equivalent by German speakers. Likewise, /ɑ/ is interpreted as the equivalent of long /a:/. So in a way, German /a/ sounds already have different English equivalents, so and therefore /æ/ needs a different equivalent. And since it's a front vowel, it's "clearly" (to me) an ä-like sound. I sometimes wish those diagrams showed more of a range of the different sounds that "pass" as that phoneme instead of a single point.
What words is /ɑ/ used in?
Car.
Cær
phonetic science is so interesting, I also wish that I was an expert in it, maybe I'll also finally understand why arabic speakers in my country orderly switch the letters "P" and "B". they do it in a such a regular pattern which baffles me.
Yeah, like when English speakers don't know how to pronounce [e:] (as e. g. in German "Zeh") and say "ay" instead. Also baffles me :)
Haha. I used to do that when I first started learning German. I can remember some colleagues teasing me for saying the letters of the alphabet as ah, bay, say, day, etc. The reason why is also the answer to OP's question. The exact sound doesn't exist in our native phonology, so we use what to us sounds like the nearest match. Eventually, you (hopefully) learn to hear and reproduce the real sound (or at least a better approximation). I also struggled to hear the difference between eh and äh for many years.
the fricative "ch" sound as well lol
Because there is no long "e" in English (except in some dialects), so it gets diphtongized, as in "way".
I know. But thanks!
How come /ɛ/ is in a different spot on both charts? I thought the phonemes were meant to be objective?
They're objective as they can reasonably be, but even the IPA only has a finite number of symbols. There can be some variation even among native speakers of the same language, or disagreements among linguists over the exact articulation. Thus the German /ɛ/ may, for some speakers at least, be slightly raised compared with the American English /ɛ/, but not raised enough to turn it into /e/. If you want or need precision, you can use diacritics and say that the standard German realization of /ɛ/ is closer to [ɛ̝].
maybe because this is how books like the Cambridge or Oxford Dictionary say these words are pronounced in American English ? tbh I keep switching between American and British pronunciation bc here in Germany in school, we usually learn British English (you know, that are those, wo pronounce dance with a long a, not an ä 😉 ), but for the last 2 years of high school, my English teacher was from the States
Do they though? Listen to the US pronunciation, sounds nothing like the "epple" that Germans use: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apple
The letter "a" isn't pronounced very consistently within the anglosphere either... maybe it's this inconsistency and the resulting insecurity of what is the "right" pronounciation, that German English speakers change the a to the closest letter in their own language. You could go and ask the reverse question: Why do American English speakers pronounce the German word "Sonne" with an "-uh" ending and not the proper German way?
makes sense. i find it that speakers of languages with diverse constants and vowels tend to pronounce foreign words better, such as native Arabic speakers. I was only confused because germans pronounce the English "a" wrong quite consistently (feels intentional if that makes sense), maybe in the 50s out 60s there was a common source of English teaching in Germany which had pronounced the "a" as "ä" even though the British "a" is already present in German. I just think that it's an interesting phonetic phenomena.
This whole class of vowels in English is really super slippery and flexible, and if you listen even to native speakers from NA, you will hear a HUGE range of pronunciations. I am not sure I get your point about Arabic, though? In terms of the number of phonemic vowels, my understanding was that both German and English actually have a wider vowel inventory than most Arabics, but I could be wrong about this.
Question: does English have more variation in vowels based on accent than German?
That is an interesting question, and one that I have not seen an answer to anywhere, although I have not dug deeply into the phonology of dialects.
the Arabic vowel letters themselves are only a few, but each has multiple versions according to their positions in a word and the type of diacritic that they have. some English/German vowel sounds however are indeed not present in Arabic and can be problematic for Arabic speakers. I also agree that there are many different English accents, but the "ä" sound in ex:"breaking bäd" sounds odd to me because it resembles that of a specific type of African American accent (and only one type of African American accent). which means that it's not the most spoken accent, it feels like an odd choice of an accent for German speakers.
>the Arabic vowel letters themselves are only a few, but each has multiple versions according to their positions in a word and the type of diacritic that they have. That is totally true, and I don't mean the number of vowel letters, but rather the number of distinct vowel sounds that are meaning bearing (i.e., where an alternate pronunciation can potentially change the meaning of the word). English has something like 20 of these vowel sounds, German--depending on how you count--has between 16 and 22, and most Arabics something like 12. For a cool visual representation of this phenomenon, you can google something called "vowel charts" or "vowel diagrams", which show the variety of vowel sounds in a given language with respect to where they are formed in the mouth.
> i find it that speakers of languages with diverse constants and vowels tend to pronounce foreign words better, such as native Arabic speakers. Not really. Every language has its quirks, very special to that langauge, and whether you can pronounce them well or not so well mainly, or only rather, depends on how well you have practiced it. A lot of people just repeat what the teacher says, who also might have an accent, and they copy it only somewhat close, but not perfectly. If you really want to speak accent free, you have to lot quite some effort into pronunciation, and meticulously go through every sound, identify your fails and work on them. For most people, that is just unnecessary effort, they better put their time and energy into learning grammar and vocabulary, because usually some accent is totally ok. Only if you work on stage or as a spy you might want to really weed out your accent. But the native language is not really a help, because even if you have a sound tha tis very similar to the sound in the foreign langauge, it will still only be similar, but not quite the same. So either you just copy it and live with the accent, or you really work out the little nuances, but that takes its time, regardless what language you're coming from.
I didn't say that they would pronounce them perfectly, I'm only saying that they have a more diverse phonetic library. also didn't mean to offend anyone in case someone took it that way, all languages are beautiful
nah, I didn't understand it as offense, no prob ;) But still, diverse does not mean that it civers all sounds of a different language completely, so you have to learn soemthign new anyway. And if you have no similar sound in your language at all, you might even get closer to the original, because you're not distracted by what you're already used to. OP's question is a good exampe for that, Germans say "ä" for English "a" because our ä is very similar to it and close enough, so we just reuse that. It is not exactly there, just close enough to not bother with it anymore, but different enough to be identified as German as soon as we open our mouth. I think if I learned Xhosa and had to practice the click sound there, it would take a while, but I'd probably get it more correctly than if German had a quite similar sound already.
>even though the British "a" is already present in German. Well yeah but not the one in "bad". I mean we don't say "fäther" either. According to the IPA, the a in "bad" is an [æ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_front_unrounded_vowel) which is a sound that does not exist in german. And to me it sounds much more like an ä than a german a.
I guess it depends on the individual but generally I bet most germans pick up pronounciations from media (films, music, etc) and more comes from the US here than from UK. I personally have been anglophil all my life and have had german and american english teachers. Apparently, I've picked up a mishmash of accents and now sound like I'm from Cork lol
no way! I also feel like sometimes I have a bit of an accidental Irish accent lol
I am not sure what you mean with 'ä' here. In German, short ä sounds exactly the same as short e. "Hätte" could have been spelled "hette". Long ä is different from long e on paper, and in words such as "bä" (the sound a goat makes) it sounds like British "air", but overall "wäre" sounds like "ware" most of the time. A basic thing you learn when learning English is that A sounds like E. (and E sounds like I, and I sounds like EI) There may be a difference between the sounds in 'bad' and 'bed' , but that distinction is hard to hear for Germans, so Germans will generally pronounce both as "bet" (or as "bed" if they manage to pronounce a D word-finally). Of course in some words A does not sound like E. You won't pronounce father and car as feather and care. But in words like grass and dance it's confusing. School books may teach you to pronounce an a-sound, but in pop songs you'll hear an e-sound, so overall it's easier to just say gress and dence. Btw, I'm Dutch and the whole above story goes for us as well. And even more so because we hear American shows and movies in the original language.
Because we cän! ;-)
love it ❤️ own it boy! 😉
You aren’t wrong. I’ve also read advice here that the ‘ä’ is the same as the ‘a’ in ‘apple’ and to use that as a German learner. I’m a Brit for context, but to me they are very distinct. Saying ‘äppel’ in English is one of the markers of a German accent. It’s a bit like ‘u’/ ‘ü’ confusion for learners of German. You have to practice it and even then it’s easy to get wrong *even though* an accent such as my English one has both in (not identical, but there are two u sounds I use).
true, I've heard äpple and äpp before.
I mean, it’s not necessarily wrong in English to say bäd or bächelor. That just sounds like the Queen in the early years of her reign.
I guess that it's not really wrong, since there are a multitude of accents out there, it only feels odd that's all
Italian here and we do exactly the same, the closest approximate sound is an open e (as we call it) and therefore most english words which present an æ when speaking in fluent speech are approximated like that. I would go as far as saying that using the correct pronunciation used in the source language when using loanwords is ironically incorrect and make harder to understand what you're talking about.
/eɪ/, if English can't decide which of its 7 distinct phonemes is the correct one why should we! >!/s!<
English words are extremely hard to pronounce.
The reason has nothing to do with different varieties of English, but rather because most Germans simply do not learn how to correctly pronounce the English "a" sound in school, and even more are not aware of the problem. Many are formally taught, incorrectly, that the English "a" sound resembles the German ä sound. This is why so many native German speakers are unable to differentiate between words such as "beg", "bag", "back", or "bake". It all ends up sounding like "beck". Unfortunately, it is very difficult for people to unlearn something that they have already learned incorrectly, even if they are aware of the problem.
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this, i sense opposition from some of the comments/dislikes, although i didn't mean the question in a negative condescending way, I realize that all speakers in the world have some sort of accent when they speak a second language.
Same reason English speakers pronounce final 'e's as /ei/ when speaking Spanish, french or Italian. When a sound doesn't have a straight analogue in the language, speakers usually overcorrect to the side of the more familiar sound. Unless you learned it early in your life or did a lot of pronunciation training
thank you for the insight
*Bad* and *bed*, *man* and *men* = to most of my countrymen, all of them have the same vowel, something like the British English vowel in *bed*, which is more or less the same sound we use in *Bett*. Many do not hear the difference, at least not, when the words are isolated. It is hardly possible to miss the difference when someone slowly says "*bad bed bat bet*", but otherwise it is hard for us to notice. And it is even harder to consistently produce the correct vowel sound, even if you are conscious that there is a difference. In addition, there is this difference between British English and American English, where words like *chance*, *dance*, *grass* can have the sound of *father* or of *bad*. Here, many Germans, influence by Pop Music or whatever, use the American sound but (see above) narrowly miss it.
I don't think the British say "bad" differently to Americans. For words like "grass" and "dance", some Englishmen will lengthen it to "graaaaws" (Ed Sheeran - Perfect for an example of this). But never with "bad".
It's an accurate rendition of the sound. Historical note: Old English didn't have the letter A. Instead the used the AE digraph. The modern English A is just a misspelling of that.
No it isn't lol. "Ae" as in encyclopaedia is pronounced like an "e" (and is now often spelled that way). Nothing like an "a"
https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_English/Orthography
What part of America are you talking about? as far as I know, America is a continent, not a country
I'm very confused by this post - that is how these words are pronounced in a generic american accent. Which accent are you thinking about where the american "a" is not pronounced like "ä"?
>Which accent are you thinking about where the american "a" is not pronounced like "ä"? All of them. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. There is absolutely nowhere in America where "bad" and "bed" rhyme.
I never said they did...? The "a" in "bad" is pronounced like "ä". The "e" in "bed" is pronounced like the "e" in "Ed", as in the name. That... still doesn't change the fact that the OP makes no sense. The "a" in "bad" remains pronounced like the "ä". Edit: I'm not a native speaker, and certainly can't natively speak in american or english accents, but I know how they are pronounced for the most part.
>The "a" in "bad" is pronounced like "ä" No, it's not. It's either /a/ (like the German a) or /ae/. >The "e" in "bed" is pronounced like the "e" in "Ed", The German ä is pronounced as either /ɛ/ or /e/ depending on the accent. The English e is pronounced as... either either /ɛ/ or /e/, depending on the accent.
I think it is a bit more messy than this, to be honest--[this stackexchange post](https://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-%C9%9B-%C3%A6-merger-happening-in-many-of-the-English-dialects) seems on target to me.
You're citing certain dialects in very specific cases. It's nowhere near the norm in America, or anywhere else for that matter, and *none* of those you listed would say "bed" and "bad" the same. I could justify saying a lot of things wrong in German if I pointed to 10 different dialects (which I don't speak) that said things the way I do in particular cases. It wouldn't make it any less wrong when I'm trying to speak in a non-regional Standard German accent.
I know! I didn't say you were wrong--I just said it is more messy! Also, I think that the (very widespread, in many dialects) /æ/ raising phenomenon really messes with how this vowel sound works in English, and accounts for the very frequent /ɛ/ that people feel they hear with what "should" be an /æ/--that is all.
You're seriously arguing that the german "ä" is not pronounced as /ae/ ? You're not a native speaker are you?
>You're seriously arguing that the german "ä" is not pronounced as /ae/ ? It isn't lol. Check any dictionary. >you're not a native speaker Native speakers natively know how to *speak*, not the IPA representations of *how* they speak. I am a native speaker of English though, and I can tell you no one ever says "bad" like "bäd". Not in America, not in Australia, not in the UK, nowhere.
Eh, it honestly doesn't matter. You're right on the pronunciation according to the IPA for æ and ɛː between the "a" in "bad" and "ä". But looking through tutorials on mastering the different pronunciations between ɛː and æ just turns up a lot of confused *native english* speakers that cannot tell or pronounce the difference. And if there's enough native english speakers who can't tell the difference, then I stand by my statement that OP doesn't have a point.
>But looking through tutorials on mastering the different pronunciations between ɛː and æ just turns up a lot of confused native english speakers Gonna need a source for this. The long ä can sound like "ay" (/ei/) to us, but idk anyone who'd mistake it for /ae/ as in bad. There's also again the implication here that people are mixing up "bed" and "bad", which again is totally ridiculous. >then I stand by my statement that OP doesn't have a point. "OP must be lying about what he and hundreds of millions of other English speaker hear because I can't tell the difference."
> "OP must be lying about what he and hundreds of millions of other English speaker hear because I can't tell the difference." Source for this claim of mine?
"I stand by my statement that OP doesn't have a point."