| Languages and dialects, with this one...thing...in common: A E I O U, Sometimes Y Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! A E I O U, A E I O U, A E I O U, A E I O U, Sometimes Y!" |
American English, or its "Midwestern" (television) dialect anyway, has about 23 vowel sounds, if I remember correctly. Spanish can be considered to have 5 vowel sounds, though a case could easily be made for a couple more.
The 5 "main" vowel sounds of Spanish are:
AH [letter a]
EH [letter e]
EE [letter i and letter y]
OH [letter o]
OO [letter u]
A common rhyme using these sounds is this one:
A, E, I, O, U [AH, EH, EE, OH, OO]
El burro sabe más que tú [ehl BOO-rroh SAH-bay MAHS kay TOO]
which means, "A, E, I, O, U, the donkey knows more than you."
It's a little confusing that the Spanish letter e is pronounced EH (like the name of our letter a) and that the Spanish letter i is pronounced EE (like the name of our letter e). I run into this sometimes when I am interpreting, and the nurse or doctor is trying to guess what the patient is spelling before I interpret the letters. The patient says "EH," and before I can interpret it as the letter e, the nurse thinks it's the letter a. Kind of annoying, but everyone is doing their best, so I just deal with it and make sure the nurse ultimately gets it right.
As you can see already, from "el burro sabe más que tú," the letter e really has two sounds, a shorter sound as in "el" [ehl] and a longer one as in "sabe" [SAH-bay]. Basically, the shorter sound appears when the e is within a syllable, and the longer one when the e is at the end of a syllable, so:
la empresa [laehm-pRAY-sah] = the business (f.)
la gente [la-HEHN-tay] = the people (f.)
There is a similar distinction to be made with shorter and longer pronunciations of the letter o, again with the shorter sound appearing within a syllable, and the longer one when the o is at the end of a syllable, but that is a much finer distinction, harder to represent phonetically, and one that you will probably be more likely to do correctly without realizing it or having to put in any extra effort. In fact, I will tend to always write the sound for o as "oh," in either position, even though there really is an ever-so-slight difference, for example, in the o sounds in:
pronto [PROHN-toh] = quickly, soon (adv.)
Basically the first o is "colored" by the n (or other consonant) that follows it in the same syllable. It's really not a big deal. The sounds are close enough to be practically identical, imho.
This is cute (and better than I could do, too):
