In the way I pronounce it, Great Lakes accent, they are slightly different diphthongs, “Eye” is like “ahy.” “Sight” and similar start the diphthong with more of an “uh” or schwa sound. So “suhyt” if we want to avoid IPA. “S-eye-t” sounds weird to me. For those of us playing along with IPA, it’s /aɪ/ vs /əɪ/.
It’s also how I distinguish “rider” vs “writer” in my accent. The “t” and “d” both are pronounced the same, as voiced intervocalic flaps (ya know, how Americans stereotypically say “wadder” instead of “water”). With “rider” I use the /aɪ/ and with “writer” I use /əɪ/. What’s the rule? I don’t know—that’s just what is instinctual to me.
Good call on the minimal pair. I also pronounce “writer” with the same vowel as “sight”, and pronounce the “t” and “d” the same.
I also grew up in the Great Lakes region, so that makes sense.
Having a little bit of a schwa or “uh” sound in “sight” is also how I’d describe the difference. I almost made a post to that effect but didn’t know how to say it.
This is not true. Pronunciation-wise, there is no such thing as “British English”, they really mean an English accent. But leaving that aside, in a Scottish accent, the vowels in “sigh” and “sight” are pronounced differently. “Tied” and “tide” are pronounced differently.
I have noticed that a lot of Americans use that pronunciation of the vowel in “sight” and “tide” and other words. I’ve wanted to ask about it for a while - are there particular areas where it happens, could there be a Scottish influence to the accent in those places?
Another possibility I wondered about is that it’s been in America since the early English colonisers, whose vowels would have been closer to how they were just after the great vowel shift.
It really is a thing, as I say I often hear it from Americans on TV. It might make things clearer to consider the difference between “sighed” and “side” - they are very different in Scotland.
I can only assume received pronunciation (RP), or nowadays maybe Standard Southern British English, is what was intended. The idea that there is a single British accent is otherwise ludicrous. RP and SSBE are what the posh/educated generally speak.
I have walked down British streets and found it near impossible to understand some accents of locals. You can travel only a few miles and the accents are totally different. Modern mass media is maybe softening the differences, but there remains an extraordinary breadth of accents. The BBC, once the soul of RP, abandoned it decades ago. Which is a great pity.
Here we go AGAIN!
The Romance language mid-vowels do not exist in English, so if we use English sounds, we can only approximate them.
The French “e” is right in between the three English sounds mentioned above. It’s also close to English “ay” (i.e., what we call the letter “a”), but without the “ee” glide at the end (diphthong).
Of the three choices, though, “eh” perhaps comes closest — “eff-el”, above.
And you can find it in some dictionaries. I use Wiktionary a lot for pronunciations, as they tend to be a bit more thorough, in my experience, than online American dictionaries. Here is there pronunciation for “sigh”:
Note the second one. That reflects a common phonetic variant where the /aɪ/ diphthong is raised and centralized before voiceless consonants (like the /t/ in “sight”). It’s extremely common in my Great Lakes dialect, but subtle enough that people who don’t have it may not notice the difference. That same voiceless vs. voiced consonant distinction is also why my “ah” stays “ah” in “riding,” but becomes more like “uh” in “writer.”
This is part of the phonomenon known as “Canadian raising” that happens in parts of the upper US and Canada. My accent does not do the more stereotypical Canadian raising where “about” becomes something closer to “aboat” (though not really “aboot”), but it does do this with “long i” vowels. It works for me in “live” (as in “coming to you live!”) vs “life,” too. “Live” gets the standard “ah” start to the diphthong. “Life” has it raised and centralized to something more like “luhyf.” Same pronunciation rule regarding voiced vs. unvoiced. And not something conscious or that I would even notice I was doing unless I stopped to analyze it.
As far as that tower, I think that in France it’s pronounced “effELL”. No “ee”.
Basically any time a word (usually a name) is used in another language, there’s a tendency to pronounce it according to thenee languages rules. E.g. “la Tour eff-ELL” is in “pair-EE” but “the eye-full tower” is in “PAIR-iss”. Then you get to renaming like Venice / Venezia, Munich / München, Peking / Beijing and so on.
To my ears, in my local dialog, the ‘difference’ if you want to call it such between “sigh” and “sight” is that the vowel in the former is held slightly longer. It’s not a distinction that American dictionaries make, but lots of other languages, and IPA, distinguish similar vowel sounds that are vocalized longer (that one-dot, two-dot stuff).
I was just half-joking
I had never actually thought much about it, but now that I do I get it.
From a Spanish-Speaking view-point diphthongs in a single letter are crazy, specially perhaps in vowels.
It’s why English speakers, when starting to learn Spanish, say what sound to a Spanish ear like “kouww mouww eh-stahs” (como estás), or “chee-layyy” (Chile).
(And, if you’re a tweener girl in 2020s USA, that “o” can be a triphthong: “Nohw-uh!” for no.)
From any view-point imaginable English pronunciation is wrong at every level. And it shows when they try to speak other languages. I remember one idjit who wanted to convince me that the first person singular pronoun in Spanish (yo) is pronounced why-ohw, but in Italian (io) it is pronounce eye-ohw. Because that is how it is written. How I managed not to punch him in his ugly face I still don’t know. Perhaps I should have.
Concerning the OP the answer was correctly given by a native speaker on post 7, Intelligently_Designed is right. In things linguistic it is usually a good advice to trust the native speakers.
And concerning the German diphtong written “eu” it is pronounced “oy”, short o, short y. Thus Euler is /ˈɔɪlər/OY-lər, Freud is ˈfʁɔʏt/, and Euklid, because the e-u is Greek and not German, is pronounced wrong in German. The Germans are incapable of saying e-u-klid, they always diphtong the e-u into oy. It’s bizarr, no matter how slowly you explain, they don’t get it.
But that is nothing compared to the absurd sounds uttered by anglophones when speaking not only their own but also other languages. I gave up making sense of it long ago.
The foreigner’s revenge is speaking horrible English.
But now and again it surprises me with new eldritch horrors I hadn’t fully realized it had, diphthongs in a sole letter for example.
Pronunciation notwithstanding though, I genuinely love English, the pronunciation is Lovecraftian but the verb conjugations are so simple.
Also it’s first the language The Lord of the Rings was translated to from the original Spanish.
And Borges loved it too (because of the Anglo-Saxon / Norman French layers , something I also like).
