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This made me curious: in what accents of English are JSON (J-SON) and Jeison pronounced the same? To answer questions like this (as I'm not a linguist) I first turn to "lexical sets" ([1], [2]) but there I find the related vowel only in the "FACE" set, marked /eɪ/ in both RP and GenAm, with examples "tape, cake, raid, veil, steak, day" not all of which I pronounce with the same vowel. Searching further on the page revealed it's known as the pane-pain merger [3], which says that they are pronounced the same in "most dialects of English": > In the vast majority of Modern English accents the vowels have been merged; whether the outcome is monophthongal or diphthongal depends on the accent. But in a few regional accents, including some in East Anglia, South Wales, and even Newfoundland, the merger has not gone through (at least not completely), so that pairs like pane/pain are distinct. And indeed just as in those accents, in my Indian accent too (influenced by spelling pronunciation [4] no doubt, and of course the fact that the distinct vowels exist in the phonemic inventory of Indian languages), I distinguish between the * /ɛː/ vowel: face, tape, cake, steak, plane, lane, late, pane (and in the context here, JSON) * /ɛɪ/ vowel: raid, veil, rain, maid, rein, pain (and in the context here, Jeison) (Wikipedia lists day/play/they with the latter for those accents, but in mine they go with the former.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lexical_set&oldid... [2]: https://www.uni-due.de/SVE/SNDS_ENG_WhatAreLexicalSets.htm [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phonological_hist... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spelling_pronunci... |
(Also, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AAl is interesting, because its diphthongal glide in accents like mine is much more pronounced than that in e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AA ... human speech is so hard to parameterize!)