In a recent post, I was trying to describe Spanish vowels succinctly to an unsophisticated participant, and used the Canadian "eh?" as an example. A participant from the U.S. (California, to be specific) commented, 'I thought Canadian "eh" is pronounced "ey", as a diphthong.'
Question 1a: How do Canadians pronounce "eh?"?
Question 1b: Is it a reasonable approximation of the Spanish pronunciation of the vowel e (as in, for example, bebé)?
Question 2: Is there a better way to explain this (succinctly!) to an unsophisticated participant?
Edit:
For an unsophisticated ELU participant, who is asking, approximately, "Hey, why do non-native English speakers talk different from me?", a very simplified way of explaining that Spanish speakers (the example he gave) pronounce their vowels differently from us. Even if the Canadian "eh?" is not identical to Spanish e as in bebé, is it different enough from the vowel in the English word day to get the point across?
Best Answer
As mentioned before, just like the letter "A" in English. It comes from a shortened form of "hey", which is actually still in use in some regions. "That was a great game of hockey, hey?"
No. Not at all close. Some accents do pronounce the interjection interrogative word (word used to "ask when surprised") "ehh" like the "e" in "bebé". But the more common word for this purpose is "huh", which cannot be faithfully rendered in Spanish, but perhaps the closest rendering would be "ja" if you allowed the sound to escape through your nasal passages at the same time as your mouth.
In Spanish, the Canadian "eh" can just be rendered as "eih", but is pronounced while exhaling, and without the typical Spanish glottal stop preceding the "e".