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.
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.