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by hannele 2997 days ago
\e\ is a sound that is basically impossible to represent unambiguously to English speakers, without falling back to how it's used in words ('e' as in 'ten', for example).

`eh` and `ay` can both easily be read as a dipthong that would be represented as `ei` in any reasonably spelled language (like Finnish).

2 comments

To keep things clear: the notation you'd typically want to use with IPA when taking about sounds (phones) is [e], as in this case, and use /e/ (with forward slashes) when taking about phonemes. Not to nitpick on you specifically, I see a lot of ad-hoc notations in these comments.
"ei" is more "ey" tho.

I think t-eh-n is pretty illustrative of why eh works better than "ay" either way - ay is much much closer to ey and so ei.