ah/ awe

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 10/3/06, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
>
> >But long a and long i as in "gate" and "might" as I hear them in m-w.com
> >are one-phthong, not two.
>
> If one relies on Merriam-Webster (nothing wrong with that, usually), one
> might consider the following, quoted from the pronunciation guide in the
> big Merriam-Webster dictionary, MW3 (I can't reproduce the symbols
> perfectly here):
>
> <</[i-macron, i.e., "long-i"]/ as in site, side, buy, tripe .... Actually,
> this sound is a diphthong, ....>>
>
> One can look in the big book itself, should one disbelieve.

Or one could look up "diphthong" in the American Heritage Dictionary
and find this definition:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/83/D0238300.html
"A complex speech sound or glide that begins with one vowel and
gradually changes to another vowel within the same syllable, as (oi)
in _boil_ or (i-macron) in _fine_."

Or, similarly, from the New Oxford American Dictionary:

"a sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable,
in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves toward another (as in
_coin_, _loud_, and _side_)."

Or if Wikipedia is one's cup of tea, try:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#English


--Ben Zimmer

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