Aman Chawla wrote:
> Actually, I am not talking about the sound in hay or bake or the Hindi
> words for dirt or harmony. Rather, the sound in bed, red, dead, led,
> fed, said, etc.
>
First of all, sorry for the typos in my last message. I didn't have much
time and wrote too quickly. I also apologize if my message was confusing.
Manjari Ohala (San José State University) in his article about Hindi
phonetics in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association,
gives /m&eps;l/ as the pronounciation of "dirt" in Hindi and /mel/ for
"harmony".
Peter Ladegoged, in the same book at the American English article, gives
/&eps;/ for the vowel found in "bed" (and /e/ in "came"), but my
Collins-Robert transcribes the same word /bed/ (and /keim/ for "came", I
suspect this is a British transcription but I'm no specialist of English
phonology!).
Now, this is why I mentioned both vowels (close and open mid-front
unrounded) and gave Majari's examples: I do not really know how you
pronounce these words.
As far as the orthography of these two words (/m&eps;l/ and /mel/), have
a look at this English-Hindi online dictionary
(http://sanskrit.gde.to/hindi/dict/eng-hin.ps) written in devanagari.
"Dirt" is on page 81, मैल .
"Harmony" is on the second line of page 131, मेल .
Now, I know that ै (U+0948) is originally a diphtong, but « in many
varities of Hindi the diphtongs ai and au have come to be pronounced as
monophtongs [ae, open o] » William Bright in World's writing Script. A
French source (Hindi Language Manual) writes "ai is open as in 'belle'
/b&eps;l(e)/ or a slight diphtong as in the English 'rail'".
So, as far as I can see, the closest you can come to /&eps;/ is using ै
(it is either /&eps;/ or /ae/ as a monophtong, and even if it is
pronounced /ae/ it is very close to /&eps;/ , look at a vowel quadilateral).
I see no other way to render that English sound using devanagari.
Patrick Andries
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