They are often used interchangeably in dictionaries, but if you take them as IPA symbols they are two different vowel sounds. /e/ is higher in the IPA chart of vowels. / ɛ / is lower. This means your mouth is a little more open, because your jaw

This debate really seems to be about two different things, spelling and pronunciation. The letter w (and y) is often used with other vowels (and sometimes alone as well) in spelling to reperesent a vowel sound . In the words hi and by , the letter

Some texts speak very loosely when they say there are five vowels. They mean to say that there are five vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u). Actually, y and w are also used as vowel letters. That is, these seven letters and combinations of them are

This was not at the level of the diphthong definition in linguistics/phonetics, but the intention to avoid wildly variable "diphthong" classification of official national school grammars. A totally different beast, it goes all the way to

Dylan Nicholson infrared: Are you talking from ERKIPA (o)? That maps to the (o)-like symbol in regular IPA, I believe. Ok, but as far as I can see (o) is supposed to be close-mid, (O) (IPA reversed c) is supposed ... words like 'dot'),

understand I think it's just a matter of dialectal variation without ... an (i) and an (l) and others don't. I don't. I thought you did, or am I getting confused with /el/ words, like "fail"? Hmm. Now I'm confused. I

Dylan Nicholson biped: For you. I was specifically talking about typical Australian accents. For me, "dared" has a diphthong: (dE:@d). (While "dead", of course, is a simple short (dEd).) But I'm with you on "ken"

Frankly speaking, I am not convinced. It's easy to prove it to yourself by experimenation. Just let the sound continue as your mouth closes without changing shape. But you don't "close your mouth" after every vowel. And it's

*Sigh* Not 'logically'. You're talking about sounds, so it's 'phonetically'. And letters and their names don't refer to sounds, but rather to writing. See http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm for a pretty

Actually the 'o' vowel in words like "no" and "go" etc. doesn't really have a proper "o" sound in it ... and from what I've heard of most American accents. It's more like a schwa-type vowel,