Dip-thong

[Donald M. Lance]

Well, I went to a dictionary too, the American Heritage 3, which also lists "dip-" as the
second pronunciation.  The etymology lists 'diptonge' in Middle English < Old French
diptongue < Late Latin diptongus < Greek diphthongos.  The (pronunciation) syllable
division is before the -th-, but the etymology has di- + phthong 'sound'.  In the
'monophthong' etymology, only Late Greek 'monophthongos' is attested.  I had to see what
Calvert Watkins had to say.
DMLance

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.
>         I suspect that there must be a connection between these two,
> neither of which has anything to do with the rampant folk-etymologizing
> (are linguists "folk"?) on this list. Given the learned nature of both
> words, they are not routinely collected in Linguistic Atlas interviews, so
> there is probably no regional-distribution information available. --Rudy