Questions tagged [diphthongs]
A phonetic sequence, consisting of two vowel targets, that is interpreted as a single vowel.
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What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?
It's easy for me to imagine the difference, but hard for me to conceptualize it. I guess one involves two vowels and the other involves a consonant, right? Am I on the right track, or is there a more ...
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Is a diphthong one phoneme or two, or does it depend?
In Mitch's answer to "What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?" and its comments it seems more than one of us is at least a bit confused as to how many phonemes a single diphthong ...
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Rationale for diphthongs
What is the rationale for considering di-, tri- &co. -phthongs separate entities? Why aren't these sounds interpreted as sequences of a vowel and a glide? How would be linguistics deficient if ...
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Why is the "long i" sound in English written /aɪ/?
The "long i" sound in English, as in "fight" is usually written /aɪ/, so fight = /faɪt/.
But /a/ is the sound in "hat", and /ɪ/ is the sound in "hit". When I say the two together it doesn't sound ...
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Diphthongs and macrons in Hawaiian
In Hawaiian diphthongs such as
ao,
sometimes a macron (a diacritical mark, Hawaiian: kahakō) occurs:
āo.
According to Hawaiian Grammar by Pukui and Elbert, we can also have
āō
and
aō.
In practice, ...
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What is an example of a language or dialect that contains triphthongs?
I spent some time on a research project examining spectrograms and coding vowels for speakers of American English from a few rural regions in the state of Oklahoma.
I noticed that certain speakers ...
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The ate-eight split?
The words "ate" and "eight" are supposed to be homophones in English, yet in (thick) Hungarian, Dutch and Swedish accents, they are not homophones. As a native Hungarian-speaker, I will attest to this:...
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Why would Hawaiian diphthongs have this structure?
The diphthongs in the Hawaiian language are:
ai ae ao au ei eu iu oi ou
One way to remember this is the diagram:
Here, a diphthong “xy” can be formed whenever “x” is further left than “y”.
This ...
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Why d͡z is not considered two consonants
Wondering why d͡z is not considered two consonants. Same with p͡f, t͡s, etc.
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Is there any proof that diphthongs exist?
I was always taught that a word contains as many syllables as it has vowels. By definition, a vowel is a sound that produces a syllable.
On the other hand, in English phonology, by definition, ...
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Swahili stress with two vowels in a row, how does it work?
I'm uncertain how stress works with two vowels in a row,
so I used a regex to grab some words out of a small learner's-dictionary,
and then make the two possible stress-patterns after each entry,
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