What's the deal with /e/?

And it’s not just that one guy, either:

British Council vowel chart

I know this is UK RP, not US English, but still.

No, pronunciation guides have changed greatly since I learned to speak. Here’s the Oxford Learners’ Dictionary guide

If I didn’t already have a good grasp of English pronunciation, I don’t think that I’d ever get it from these sources. I’m baffled as to who thought this was a good idea.

I’ve been confused ever since people started using the IPA, I can’t figure out what the letters are supposed to sound like.

Whatever happened to a bar over a long vowel and a little rimmed saucer over a short vowel? and a schwa for in between sounds?

^^ Used to love that schwa!

I was taught that epsilon is the proper symbol for the “lax”-e sound, as in “get” and “bed”. That seems to be the standard IPA convention.

So unless Brits pronounce “gate” and “get” as homophones, that classification is wrong.

^Well, almost. The “long a” in gait is a diphthong (see the chart in my previous post).

Listening to the examples on that chart, the “short e” there does sound somewhere in between the “lax e” and the “tense e”. But the actual Brits I spoke to seemed to pronounce the “short e” pretty much like the “lax e”, as we do in the US.

Listening to some of these examples on Forvo , the Australian pronunciation sounds a bit more like the “tense e”, but the US and UK sound pretty lax to me.

Didn’t fluther use to have a bunch of ESL teachers? Where’d they go?