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Re: Diphthongs

From:Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
Date:Friday, October 5, 2001, 18:07
Vasily Chernov wrote:
> > In my opinion, [ai] is a diphthong, HOWEVER, [aj] is a much shorter > >diphthong, such that it's easier to be thought of as one sound rather >than > >two, whereas [ai] could be thought of as two. If you put glottal stops >in > >between the vowels than there's no question; it's not a diphthong. A >good > >way to tell which you have is to lengthen it. If you lengthen [aj], >you'll > >end up with [a:j] with a very short release. > >Or [aj:], e.g. in Swedish (AFAIK).
Hm, in my pronounciation, [j] never gets long. When I think about it, it seems to make more sense to see /aj/, /oj/, /ej/ etc as diphthongs than as vowel-plus-consonant as I was thought in school. For a start, I can't have long vowels before /j/, and the /j/ attaches to the preceeding syllable when intervocal - for instance "naja" is /naj.a/, not "na-ja" as my basic-school teachers'd had me syllabify it. Andreas _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp