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Re: Ng'and'ana

From:Irina Rempt <irina@...>
Date:Thursday, January 24, 2002, 9:00
On Thursday 24 January 2002 08:08, you wrote:

> En réponse à Elliott Belser <renyard@...>: > > Okay... question. Is a dipthong 'two vowels of a language spoken > > as one sound?'
No, that's a digraph (more exactly, a digraph is two letters used to write one sound). A diphthong is a vowel sound that starts as one and ends at the other, as Christophe said.
> English is full > of those dihptongues written as one letter, so that English > speakers have a hard time understanding that those sounds are not > simple but composed.
Also, I've noticed that English speakers have a hard time understanding that one simple sound can be written with two letters; we had a native English speaker leading the choir's voice exercises, singing different vowels, and he wouldn't do [u] because that's written "oe" in Dutch, and "it's a diphthong". I couldn't get it across to him that it *really* is only one sound, only it's written with two letters because we have no single letter to represent it. (Dutch "u" is [y]). He did allow [i] which is written "ie" (I don't know whether he realized that; I'll tell him). Now, the *names* of the letters "a e i o u" are pronounced [a] [e] [i] [o] [y] (pronounced that way in open syllables as well) and that's what he made us sing. Irina -- irina@valdyas.org http://www.valdyas.org/irina --------------------------------------------------------------------- By my troth, we that have good wits have much to answer for. We shall be flouting; we cannot hold. - William Shakespeare, _As You Like It_

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Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>