Dip-thong

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:41 PM -0700 5/18/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote:
>Unlike Larry, whenever and wherever I first picked up the word, it was
>solely with /p/, and I suspect that I probably even spelled it that way
>until forced by comparison with "monoph-thong" to notice the -ph- . Unless
>I am being very careful in lecture, I usually still pronounce it with /p/.
>        Similarly, I learned "amphitheater" with /p/ as well, and it was
>not until I was living in Turkey and discovered that it was written with
>-f- that I noticed the -ph- in the spelling. Interesting that M-W 10th
>also gives the pronunciation with -p- as second, indicating that in both
>cases it must be fairly common.

and
At 11:40 AM +0100 5/19/00, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>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
>
OK, I evidently stand alone on the [f] in diphthong.  And the one in
amphitheater as well, which my old M-W NCD7 [1967] stubbornly insists is
the ONLY pronunciation extant; evidently there was a dramatic change in the
language over the last third of the past century that didn't quite reach
me.  On the other hand, I always pronounced "diphtheria" with a DIP.  I
think the former two I must have first encountered in reading, the last in
hearing (those awful many-in-one shots in childhood).

larry