are americans incapable of ending a word with like a flat e instead of an 'ey'
@pup_hime the /e/ sound just doesn't exist in english, is the problem
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@Felthry its in eg. mechanical
@pup_hime that's an /ε/, not /e/
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@Felthry its close though
@pup_hime they sound pretty distinct to me?
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@Felthry maybe im pronouncing mechanical wrong then
wikipedia suggests "bet" as an approximation
@pup_hime yeah, that's the same vowel
it's possible that it's just that, as a monolingual english speaker, /e/ sounds a lot closer to /ei/ (as in bay) than it does to /ε/ (as in bet), so it's more likely we'd approximate it as /ei/ than /ε/
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@Felthry thats fascinating, i totally dont hear it like that
@pup_hime How one perceives sounds often relates to what sounds exist in the languages they're exposed to, I suppose--often people can't tell the difference between two sounds that, to someone who speaks another language, are very distinct
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@pup_hime also whether their language considers two sounds to be different phonemes or different realizations of the same phoneme; a lot of english speakers don't realize there's a difference between /l/ and /ɫ/ (though i think they can usually notice it when it's pointed out), despite the fact that both sounds exist in english, because they're seen as two realizations of the same phoneme in different environments
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