Pronunciation of eheu

 

cinefactus

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How is this correctly pronounced?
 

Iáson

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ēheu, surely? With stress on the ē. The diphthong, I think, is [eʊ̯].
 
 

cinefactus

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Thanks. It is the eu sound I have problems with. The wikipaedia site suggested that eʊ̯ is like ceux in French, which makes it a lot clearer. (Although the wiki on Czech said it is like the eu in pneumatic, which definitely didn't help!)
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

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The wikipaedia site suggested that eʊ̯ is like ceux in French
I think the eu in eheu is a diphthong, as Iáson said. The French eu isn't a diphthong; it's a single vowel.
 
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Etaoin Shrdlu

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And you think English vowels are funny. We don't do that quintessentially Gallic one.
 

Pacifica

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Eu is pretty weird, yes. Some other French vowels are weird too, notably all the nasalized ones. But, as I said to Callaina recently, I think English has more vowels than French, and therefore more weird ones too — that is, vowels that will sound weird to people whose native languages have a much smaller variety of vowels.
 
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Etaoin Shrdlu

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There's a fair amount of weirdness in the impurity of the vowels, which is why an anglophone accent is often easy to recognise in other languages. But that's only standard English; as you've heard, there are dialects with pure ones.

Edit: that's misleading, I suppose, since there are some pretty impure vowels in some dialects. But you probably know what I mean.
 

Callaina

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No matter what you come up with, you can't possibly do worse than me, who for the longest time pronounced it (mentally) as "eh-hoy" (yes, like "ahoy" with the first vowel changed). :redface:

I did the same for the Greek diphthong ευ, which led my Greek teacher to (correctly) guess that I spoke German, since her Greek teacher (who spoke German) had made exactly the same mistake. :D
 
 

cinefactus

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That is how I thought it should be pronounced at first too ;) How else would you pronounce Europa...
 
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