Re: Ng'and'ana

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
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