Vowels are a pain in the derrière.
I pronounce the vowel in “air” different from “get”, “bed”, etc. For me, “air” and “err” are not homophones.
Actually, in my New-Orleans area dialect of English, the vowels in “air”, “ate”, and “bed” are all different from one another.
The written medium isn’t really the best to deal with phonetics is it? As far as I’m concerned, “eer” and “ear” are homonyms, except that if “eer” is a real word, I don’t know what it means.
N’importe quoi!
Ladies and gentlemen, whereas there is nothing wrong with regional dialects and accents, and I think that people should be proud of their cultural heritage, Québequois pronounciation of the French language is just something else.
This is nonsense: and “é” does not sound like “eh” or “pah-tay” except when pronounced by Anglophone tourists, or possibly the Québequois. Actually, I also remember a Swiss kid having an unsuccessful attempt at fishing on the Lake of Geneva who would exclaim every five minutes “Oh! Mon fil il est emmêl-ay!” (interesting use of English phonetics at the end of a French sentence there). But in standard French - and I’m going to all culturally fundamentalist here - it sounds like the “e” in “eer”/“ear”.
And you can ask the Académie Française if you still don’t agree, as they are the only competent authority to decide these things.
My French teacher always taught us that an unaccented e was for the most part unvoiced, such as in maintenant. Adding the grave accent gives it the ‘air’ pronunciation, so that you actually sound out the vowel.
So when writing, if you sound out the ‘e’ then it’s either followed by a double consonant, as in bordelond’s example, or it has a grave accent.
“e” without an accent is “euh” sound (if that make any sense). Or it is very often, completely silent, specially at the end of a word. The accents graves and aigus make it sound like “eh” “ai” or whatever said above!
Never mind “e” - what annoys me is hearing English speakers pronounce French “a” wrongly. It is not pronounced “ah” (like in the example above, “pah-tay” for “pâté”). The correct pronunciation is similar to the a in “cat” (“pa-teh”, approximately).
BTW, Zorro, what are you on about with this “ear” business? You’re saying that “pâté” should be pronounced “pa-tee”?
Putain, mais c’est pas possible! I never realised it would be this difficult to make quite a simple point. There seems to be a much greater variety of ways to pronounce the word “ear” than I ever imagined. Where is there an “ee” (or French “i”) in the word “ear”? I said, it sounds like the “e” in “ear”. Try exaggerating the accentuation when you say “ear”. You will find that pronouncing the “e” requires you to contract muscles in your cheeks, pulling the corners of your mouth back, to retract your tongue slightl: that’s the sound I’m talking about.
Now you’re going to tell me that in Reading it’s pronounced “Yargh”.
I agree this is more like hard work than it ought to be Zorro, but I don’t think we have a problem with pronouncing the word “ear”, we have a problem matching it to “é”. Perhaps others will disagree with me, but they way I understand it:
ear rhymes with “cheer”, “tier” or “sincere”, but
é doesn’t sound like that, it rhymes with “today”, “prey” or “eh?”
And to address the OP, I pronounce è to sound like the e in “forget”, ê to sound like “air” without the r and an unaccented e to sound like the u in “muscle” (more or less, allowing for the variations bordelond has mentioned).
Let’s all agree to leave the Military guys mispronouncing “cache” thread alone shall we?
Thanks for the support Everton. I’m not sure why I’m bothering to continue with this, but it’s probably to do with sheer bloody mindedness.
I’m afraid that I have to tell you that your beliefs relating the pronounciation of “é” are wrong. I shall now reveal nmy credentials to the world: I am a Franco-British hybrid and have spoken both fluent French and English all my life. Now I don’t like to be arrogant (although I do enjoy the odd moment of smugness), but you can take my words as Gospel on this.
I’m going to drop the “ear” thing, as it isn’t working.
“é” doesn’t rhyme with “eh”, “yay!”, “hooray!”, “prey” or “sittin’ on the dock of the bay”.
It sounds like the first “e” in “cheer” or “beer”, like the first “i” in “Billingsgate fish market”, or the “i” in “James Bigglesworth”.
And I can’t think of a single word in English where the sound of an unaccented “e” is replicated. The “u” in “muscle” sounds almost exactly the same as a French “a”. Try saying “Dur” (onomatopeia denoting stupidity), but contract your lips into an O shape.
That’s pretty much what it sounds like.
I knew I’d expained the unaccented e badly as soon as I pressed submit. But the i in Billingsgate or Bigglesworth doesn’t sound like any sound in beer or cheer to me.
Zorro, I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding you or I’m just confused over this whole ear thing, but “é” - according to my French dictionary - is pronounced like the E in “blé” or the ER in “jouer.” How on earth does that sound - which in English would be a short “ay” rhyme with the first E in “cheer” or the I in “Bigglesworth”?
And I’m not trying to be insulting, but being French or English or speaking either one of those languages fluently doesn’t make anyone an expert. Witness the people here - most of them are native English speakers, and how many grammar and pronunciation threads are started, with everyone arguing over what they KNOW FOR A FACT is the correct answer??? One one of them is correct. And they’ve all been speaking English all their lives too.
For the vast majority of English speakers the world over, the vowel in English “ear” is in fact equivalent to the Standard French “i” as in ici. The French “i” is shorter in duration than the American English “long e”, and in the word “ear”, the vowel ends in a centering rhotacized offglide thanks to the “r”, but phonetically, the two sounds are otherwise very similar.
This comparison may not work for you, however, due to the way your dialect of English treats the “r” in words like "dear"and “ear”. How about this one: to your reckoning, is the vowel in English “eat” equivalent to the Standard French “i” as in ici (aside from duration)?
For most English speakers, it doesn’t make sense to analyze the “e” in “ear” seperately from the “a” the way you are doing. The “ea” is typically seen as an indivisible orthographic unit signifying the American English “long e” (cf. French “i” in “ville”, “ici”). In most American English, “ear” is a clear one-syllable word. We’ve got the vowel “long e”, then the approximant “r” lends a centering rhotacized offglide to the end of that “long e”. At the end of the word, most Americans then give the “r” a brief jolt of distinct, consonantal pronunciation.
In your dialect – and I have to blindly guess, because I can’t hear you speak — for the word “ear”, you may pronounce something like “e-uh”, where the “e” is like French “é”, and the “uh” is a distinct segment with no r-coloring at all. It sounds like it makes sense in your dialect to mentally break up the “e” and the “a” in “ear”. There’s nothing wrong with that – but it is not necessarily typical of English pronunciation in very many places, and it is not something with which you can count on other English speakers necessarily being familiar.
Upon reading further, it seems likely that your pronunciation of “cheer” and “beer” would sound to most all Americans as “chair”, “bare” – except the American would wonder “why isn’t he sounding out his r’s?”
You are exactly correct on this point. However, if an American speaker learns to clip the “y” glide off of the diphthong “ay, ey”, the resulting sound is pretty much the French “é”.
Not exactly equivalent to American English “ay, ey” – see my post above. Full-valued, unclipped “ay, ey” are crude approximations of French “é”, and are definite indications of an American English accent to a native Fench speaker. You can still be understood for the most part, though. Usually, no conversational harm is done.
I know “ay” isn’t exactly equivalent to French “é” but it’s close enough for English speakers who have no knowledge of how French is pronounced. That’s why I said a “short ay” - because the Y is clipped.
Oh, and just so you know, I also speak fluent French, I lived there, I went to University there, and I have a degree in French Language and Culture, several advanced certificates in French, and have been doing professional translations into and out of French for 8 years. Don’t want you to think I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Not that I am an expert by any means! But not a total neophyte either.
I apologize if I came off snarky. 
It just seems to me that Zorro is applying a high degree of rigor to the discussion – which is OK.
Not at all. And I think I sounded snotty, which I didn’t mean to either; just wanted to point out that I know a little, and also that my own credentials don’t make me an expert either. I am sure there are practically infinite things I don’t know about French. But I’m still confused about the E in “ear” sounding like “é”!
I don’t get it?
“é” doesn’t sound like "the first “e” in “cheer” or “beer”, like the first “i” in “Billingsgate fish market”, or the “i” in “James Bigglesworth” "
or we have a very very different way of pronouncing “beer” in English.
I am confused (and French). 
Again, your analysis of "the first ‘e’ in ‘cheer’ " can cause confusion, because “ee” is treated as an indivisible unit in American English (and a heckuva lot of British English). In American English “ee” (like “ea”) is pronounced as a longish version of French “i” in “machine”.