Re: Status of Italian rising

At 5:41 PM +1100 12/10/02, Tristan wrote:
>Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>
>>Likewise, the common distinction made between rising and falling diphthongs may be at
>>odds with the spectrographic data. One way we do know that there is such a
>>distinction in English is to look at how they pattern. With respect to stress
>>assignment and syllable structure, falling diphthongs pattern with tense
>>vowels while rising diphthongs pattern with lax vowels.
>>
>Temporarily delurking here...
>
>Um... could you explain that a bit more? I thought dipthongs *were*
>tense vowels in English? I tried doing a search on the Internet about
>rising and falling diphthongs just now but I've only come out more
>confused... half the stuff I read says something about rising and
>falling diphthongs being umm... 'based' on either the first or second
>element, which would, to the best of my knowledge, make all English
>dipthongs of the one sort, yet others said a rising dipthongs started
>low and went high, but a falling diphthong started high and went low (so
>/ai/ 'I' would be rising but /I@/ 'ear' would be falling. Though /I@/ to
>me doesn't sound very diphthongal in the same way that /ai/ is; it seems
>more like two vowels sharing one syllable (or one long vowel depending
>on its realisation)).
>
>Did I make sense?
A rising diphthong is a diphthong in which the most sonorous element is second.
A falling diphthong is one in which the most sonorous element is first. By
those definitions, /aI/ is a falling diphthong, and /ju/ is a rising diphthong.
The discussion of English vowels vs diphthongs generally centers around the
tense mid vowels /e, o/. In many (but not all!) varieties of English, these
vowels are realized as diphthongs: [eI] and [oU] (or [@U] in RP). Northern
varieties of both American and British English may realize these vowels as
monophthongs.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson

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