For a non-native English speaker like me, it's always been hard to sound /æ/ and /ɛ/ differently. For example, "salary" and "celery" are two words that I tend to pronounce identically.
Is it OK to go on like this or should I practice to get it right?
Here is a typical English vowel chart:
As you can see, /æ/ and /ɛ/ are quite close to each other, and so have quite a similar sound. The difference is in the degree of openness: /æ/ is “near-open” and /ɛ/ is “open-mid”. If you want to make a clear distinction between the two, you need to practice, practice, practice. When I was learning phonetics, I found the best practice was to try to make long continuous vowels that go along the axes, like /iiiiiiiieeeeeeeeɛɛɛɛɛɛɛɛææææææææaaaaaaaa/. Once I was able to master making the entire continuum, it became easier to find individual points along the continuum.
Celery e as in evet Salary as the e in lütfen
You could pronounce salary just as if it were a Turkish word as well.
The /æ/ sound (which in American English is the sound present in words like cat, gap, fan, man) is pronounced by dropping your jaw down as if you were going to say [ä]; then from that position try saying /ɛ/.
As I don't know Turkish, so I'm afraid I can't give you examples of pronunciation in your native language, but this may still help:
salary: SAH - lah - ree
celery: CELL - lair - ree
The most dictionaries I consulted show that the first e in celery is IPA e (seləri).
Read what the important phonetician Daniel Jones said about æ
The correct sound of æ can generally be obtained by remembering that æ must have a sound intermediate in quality between ɛ and a. In practising the sound, the mouth should be kept very wide open.
The sound may be obtained by imitating the baaing of a sheep which is very like ˈbæː . Those who are unable to obtain the exact quality by practising such exercises should note that it is better to err on the side of a rather than on the side of ɛ (my emphasis) . a is actually used for æ in some parts of the North of England. (Note 401 in this book).
I also noticed the emphasized part from my own experience with words such as happy and laptop.
@Mehper C. Palavuzlar The easiest thing you can do in keeping the difference between [ɛ] and [æ]is to pronounce every [æ] like [a]. I know most people don't even realize a simple fact that for most British people [æ] is quite a foreign sound. In the Midlands, Northern Britain, Scotland, Wales, Ulster and Ireland [a] is the most usual, typical realization of [æ]. The same is true for both Canadian and Caribbean dialects &/or accents.
You might subscribe to a podcast located at speakmoreclearly.com which offers phonological analysis and pronunciation practice of English accents (British, American and Australian). Repeated practice on this sentence will do wonders: 'Yet another white man doomed to rot under the tropic sun!'
