Aman Chawla wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">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" (p.102).
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 varieties of Hindi the diphtongs ai and au have come to be pronounced as monophtongs [ae, open o] » William Bright in World's writing Script (p. 388). 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
