Dip-thong

[Lynne Murphy]

Like Rudy Troike, unlike Larry Horn, I have never said 'dif-thong' (or
amfi-theatre, for that matter), but I've also noticed that since studying
and living among Southern Bantu languages, I am much more apt to interpret
'ph' as 'p' in new words that I encounter (and sometimes 'th' as
't'--especially in names), since the 'h' there stands for aspiration, rather
than being part of a digraph for a fricative.

Lynne

P.S.  'pH' is a legal word in Scrabble if you're playing outside North
America (different official dictionaries, which is related to the fact that
the Scrabble brand is owned by Hasbro in N America and Mattel in the rest of
the world, and each has its own relationships with Merriam-Webster and
Chambers-Harrap, respectively).  The reasoning is that since pH doesn't
start with a capital letter, it's not a proper noun or abbreviation.  This
annoys me to no end, but it's a handy thing for those vowelless times.

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK