"man" vs. "men" pronunciation in American English
Here are 10 audio clips taken (more or less randomly) from a book narrated by a professional American narrator. In 5 of them, he is saying man, and in the other 5, men.
Is it possible for a native speaker to tell which word is being said? Or are the two words indistinguishable in this person’s speech?
On a technical side, I’ve tried to analyze the first two formants (using Praat) as well as the duration of the vowel in each of the recordings. Neither of the parameters seems to conclusively determine the identity of the vowel.
In comments, John Lawler wrote:
Not out of context. What people sometimes forget is that everybody is different, and they talk different (so much so that we can recognize voices), and they vary from moment to moment. Every gesture a human makes is at least microscopically different from other gestures, and that includes phonetic gestures. Consequently, any linguist would predict that native speakers would vary their ordinary pronunciation from word to word, in context, to the point of often overlapping other close phonemes. That's why digital writing is always a poor substitute for the stream of speech.
Plus, these vowels are involved in a sound change occurring in American English. Native speakers do not identify which word was actually said within longer utterances such as connected speech merely by each word’s isolated pronunciation devoid of surrounding context and redundant signalling.
Grammatical number is also signalled by agreement with verbs and sometimes by pronouns or determiners, including demonstratives like this and those. That means it often doesn’t matter whether there may sometimes be little difference in the sounds actually produced when saying man and men. Here’s once such example where it wouldn’t confuse anyone:
- This man is not himself.
- Those men are not themselves.
Besides (or in conjunction with) the Northern Cities Chain Shift that John mentioned, you must also account for the effects of /æ/ Raising on such words as man:
In most American and many Canadian English accents, /æ/ raising is specifically /æ/ tensing: a combination of greater raising, fronting, lengthening, and gliding that occurs only in certain words or environments. The most common context for tensing /æ/ throughout North American English, regardless of dialect, is when this vowel appears before a nasal consonant (thus, for example, commonly in fan, but rarely in fat).
The realization of this "tense" (as opposed to "lax") /æ/ varies from [æ̝ˑ] to [ɛə] to [eə] to [ɪə], and can be dependent on the particular dialect or even speaker.
I very strongly recommend studying the many different actual pronunciations of words like ten and hand to see how diverse the actual phonetics really are from one speaker to the next. Those links include both sound clips and actual IPA for each. I would study both if I were you.
Each of those would be quite easily identified by native speakers as the word they are when uttered within the context of that native speaker’s particular accent.
It does not really do much good to use what dictionaries say the pronunciations for such things happen to be. They are only broad phonemic guidances for native speakers. They never give the detailed phonetics that represent the scores of ways native speakers pronounce any given word.
Dictionary phonemics must always be reëvaluated for each given accent’s phonological rules before the actual pronunciation can be produced or assessed. Native speakers simply have no need of that, because our minds do it automatically, just as we use implicit contextual clues to guide our understanding of which word was said. We do not think about any of this, but both of these are crucial to understanding actual speech. Without them, you will be forever lost.