Do any other languages have that same “A” sound that English has in words like apple, cash, mat, pad, etc.?
While I speak only English, I have a minor fascination with other languages. I’ve noticed that in every language I’ve looked at that uses the Roman alphabet, “a” is nearly always pronounced with an “ah” sound. Similarly, languages that use different alphabets or writing systems, when transliterated into the Roman alphabet always seem to use “A” to represent an “ah” sound, and don’t seem to contain an “‘A’ as in ‘apple’” sound. For example, Romanized Japanese represents various “a” sounds like so:
“ah” sound is written “a”
“ay” sound is written “ei” (eh-ee sounds run together to produce “ay”)
But “a” as in “apple”? No equivalent sound? None that I can find when looking at the Japanese hiragana (phonetic “alphabet”).
It appears, on the surface, that this particular sound is unique to English. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
You’re thinking of the ash, or near-open front unrounded vowel. The wiki article has a pretty good summary, including a list of some languages that use it.
äpfel (apple) sounds kind of like a mix between ep-fel, ip-fel, and ape-fel. It’s similar but it’s not the same sound (at least not the way I hear it).
Edit: But the “eh” sound has it drehen (to turn) for instance has that sound.
Well, without knowing how ‘apple’ is pronounced in central cascadia, it’s kind of a tough question. According to Webster (and me :)) ‘apple’ is pronounced **'a-pəl**, using the open front unrounded vowel sound. This is a sound that is common to many languages. A short ‘simple’ ‘a’ sound.
OTOH, a lot of people use a diphthong in the first syllable of ‘apple’ - so maybe that’s the sound you’re not hearing in other languages ? Is that the sound you’re talking about Omi no Kami ?
Of course other languages have regional variations as well, so while you don’t hear a whole lot of diphthongs in Paris for example, they’re a lot more common in the south of France.
The sound Omi and Phase are referring to is not the one in your link. It’s the one right above it, the near-open front unrounded vowel. Scroll down the page for examples in other languages (r.g. Finnish, Norwegian, Farsi).
The Hungarian <á> is usually transcribed phonetically as /æ/, at least among Hungarian phoneticians. While the sound is slightly different from the English /æ/, it’s close enough. (/æ/ being, of course, the IPA transcription for the standard English pronunciation of the <a> in apple).
The Hungarian “á” does not sound like a short a in American English. It’s an open front unrounded vowel. The IPA symbol for the sound is “a:”, which is similar to an “ahhhh” sound. For a general American English accent, the short “o” sound is the closest to the Hungarian “á.”
According to the vowel chart shown on this page, Hungarian short “e” (as in ez) closely approaches American English /æ/. There are sure to be dialectical variations, of course.
Yes, “e” is much closer, but still, to my ears, sounds closer to an American English short e than the short a. It’s in the ballpark, but I don’t think an American English speaker would hear the Hungarian word ez (“that”) as “azz,” but rather “ezz.”
edit:
If you look here, you’ll see the Hungarian “e” corresponds to the General American English short e exactly, at least according to the IPA symbols for the sounds, so the Hungarian ez and the American English bed contain the same vowel sound.
OK, I’m a little mixed up with the phonetic symbols, but I think I’m getting it. Although the wikipedia sound sample for ‘near-open front unrounded’ is slightly more diphthongized than what I would call the standard (potato, potahto…) I guess we’re talking about the same short ‘a’ found in ‘cat’ ‘mat’ etc. So assuming the OP’s accent is close to the wikipedia sample, I would say this is a very common sound around the Mediterranean - as a previous poster mentioned - French sac has pretty much the same ‘a’ as English sack - or Spanish sacar depending on the speaker’s regional accent. Or staying closer to apple - appel, apellido. OTOH I would agree that the stronger diphthong, or the US southern vowel sounds are less common -some Russian vowels kind of head that way.
On preview - re ‘naranja’, I guess it really depends on regional differences