diphthong

[Dennis R. Preston]

Not quite. the "oy" in "boy" is one phoneme, albeit with two distinct
parts. If you mean to say two "phones" linked together, you are right on.
Let's not confuse our phones and our phonemes. (Us linguists have had
enough problems whith phonemes over the last thirty years or so to last an
academic lifetime!)

dInIs

>But they're not the same.  In a diphthong, one can hear, more or less, the
>gliding from one sound to the other, as in boy ('boi ee); thus, the two
>graphemes represent distinct phonemes, which, though blended together, retain
>their individuality.   In a digraph, however, separate graphemes represent
>only one phoneme,  as with ea in "meat" (one hears only "e") or the ch in
>chair, in which case, a completely different phoneme  is heard--that is, one
>which is not characteristic of the sounds represented by the individual
>graphemes.  The word cluster refers to two or more contiguous consonants, as
>with the str in street or the shr in shrimp.  In fact, in most discussions of
>clusters, three-consonant ones are always given as examples.
>
>I haven't kept up with the elementary school reading textbooks, but I would
>be surprised to find that these very different concepts have all been lumped
>together under the label of cluster or digraph.
>                        PAT


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736