In English’s defence, it’s not an English word. It’s a German company named after a Spanish name. And at least to my ear, the Spanish and German pronunciations also have 3 different Es. One helpful Redditor also provided an IPA guide to the German pronunciation, agreeing with my ears:
mɛrˈtseːdɛs
The “e” in the middle is long and stressed.
Edit: I would also say, that most of the times it is even pronounced like this:
məˈtseːdɛs
But I can’t even begin to justify the letter c sounding like /s/, /k/, and /ʃ/.
For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.
Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.
I do wonder if there might be a difference between the phonemes and the realisation, the way there was in German according to the German commenter.
But also, even without that, stress undoubtedly changes the perception of the vowel (not nearly as much as in English, but certainly not nil), as does an r after a vowel.
Well the c being s and k thing comes from latin I think :3 like v and u being the same letter… and I believe i also had a second sound? Plus there’s vowel shifts that happened after the writing was standardized and all that, and characters that no longer exist like Þ and ð
Either way it can be confusing when coming from a language with a fairly regular pronunciation ^^ (though of course we also have some quirks lol)
In English’s defence, it’s not an English word. It’s a German company named after a Spanish name. And at least to my ear, the Spanish and German pronunciations also have 3 different Es. One helpful Redditor also provided an IPA guide to the German pronunciation, agreeing with my ears:
But I can’t even begin to justify the letter c sounding like /s/, /k/, and /ʃ/.
For what it’s worth, all the ‘e’ in mercedes pronounced in swedish sound the same (first can sound ‘ä’ in some regions though).
For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.
Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.
I do wonder if there might be a difference between the phonemes and the realisation, the way there was in German according to the German commenter.
But also, even without that, stress undoubtedly changes the perception of the vowel (not nearly as much as in English, but certainly not nil), as does an r after a vowel.
Don’t know about other Germans but for me, the last e is a schwa. So it’s more [mɛɐ̯ˈtseːdəs] I think but I’m not completely sure.
Well the c being s and k thing comes from latin I think :3 like v and u being the same letter… and I believe i also had a second sound? Plus there’s vowel shifts that happened after the writing was standardized and all that, and characters that no longer exist like Þ and ð
Either way it can be confusing when coming from a language with a fairly regular pronunciation ^^ (though of course we also have some quirks lol)