Difference between revisions of "Diphthong"
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*[[falling diphthong]] | *[[falling diphthong]] | ||
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===Origin=== | ===Origin=== | ||
Revision as of 20:17, 29 November 2007
A diphthong is a vowel whose quality changes significantly in one direction during its pronunciation.
- "When the medial phase shows an audible change of quality, with the change consistently progressing toward a single target, as it were, then the sound is classified as a diphthong." (Laver 1994:146)
Examples
[ai] in English wine, [au] in English house.
Comments
Often phonologists do not agreee whether a tautosyllabic sequence of two sounds is a diphthong or a sequence of vowel plus glide, or glide plus vowel.
Subtypes
Origin
From Greek di-phthongos [two-sound]. The word is first attested in English in the 15th century.
Related terms
- monophthong (a vowel whose quality does not change)
- triphthong (a vowel whose quality changes twice during its pronunciation)
- diphthongization
References
- Laver, John. 1994. Principles of phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Other languages
German Diphthong (de) Czech dvouhláska
