Let’s learn another confusing vowel phoneme pair: /ɛ/ and /æ/. These two vowels can be difficult for non-native speakers because both are frontal and lax vowels. In light of the tongue height, /ɛ/ is low middle and /æ/ is low. For /ɛ/, the muscles of the lips and mouth should be relaxed. After placing the tongue in the middle position, just let the air out to say /ɛ/.
/æ/ is traditionally classified as a lax vowel, but it takes a lot of muscles to produce the /æ/ sound. This is due to the fact that /æ/ is a low vowel. That is, to place the tongue low, the jaws have to be open. The middle part of the tongue is raised and the tip of the tongue touches the back of the bottom teeth. There is vibration in the throat. People often describe the /æ/ sound as the cry of a goat: “Meh-eh.” We non-native speakers often realize the existence of these two vowels through the pronunciations of ‘men’ and ‘man.’ To distinguish /ɛ/ and /æ/ in ‘men’ and ’man’ respectively, the vowel in ‘man’ is a lot longer than the vowel in men. ‘Men’ has a pure /ɛ/ sound. but ‘man’ has a modified /æ/ sound, as it is pronounced /mæən/. Indeed, when /æ/ comes before nasal consonants, like /n, m/ or voiced consonants like /d, g/ it becomes lengthened and tensed: e.g., fan vs fat, bag vs back.
/ɛ/ words
These are words with /ɛ/.
with “e”:
accept, bell, bend, best, bet, correct, desk, egg, end, get, hell, help, hotel, jet, leg, lend, let, met, neck, next, pen, sell, send, set, spend, suggest, tell, well, went, wet, when, yell, yes
with "ea":
ahead, already, bread, breakfast, breath, cleanse, dead, deaf head, health, Heather, heavy, instead, jealous, pleasure, ready, spread, steady, sweat, threat, threaten, treachery, tread, treadmill, treasure, wealth, weapon, weather
/æ/ words
These are words with /æ/.
with “a”:
act, actually, add, after, and, ankle, ant, aunt, back, bad, bag, band, banned, bank, bat, black, can, can’t, carry, dam, fact, family, flat, half, hand, happen, happy, hat, land, last, man, match, matter, plan, practice, sad, sat, stand, thank, travel, understand, value, tax, track
(‘Ant’ and ‘aunt,’ ‘band’ and ‘banned’ are homophones.)
These words have the /æ/ sound with unusual spelling.
laugh, meringue /məˈræŋ/, plaid /plæd/
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