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In American English, a lot of vowels are gliding dipthongs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General
by smallnamespace 10y ago
In American English, a lot of vowels are gliding dipthongs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowel...
For example, the 'i' in 'bright' is a dipthong that sort of glides from 'uh - aye' very quickly.
Many languages have very few dipthongs -- e.g. Japanese and Spanish come to mind, and Mandarin has some, but they're mostly different from English. If you go from a language that has 5 pure vowel sounds like Spanish to something like 15-20 in English (depending on the dialect), it's hard to keep track of them all and pronounce them correctly [1], especially since English orthography hinders rather than helps you, whereas dipthongs in Spanish are pronounced exactly as they're rendered (e.g. cauda is like ca-u-da spoken fast).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels
- jdmichal 10y agoMaybe theoretically Spanish has no diphthongs. But rapid speech definitely sees diphthongs develop as sounds merge together -- a very much Spanish thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#Spanish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#Spanish Your example would be /kau̯.da/, with the a and u merging into a single syllable diphthong.
- smallnamespace 10y agoSure, but here Spanish orthography is actually representative of the sound, whereas English orthography is a mess (plus English has more than 5 base vowel sounds to begin with). No matter how you cut it, English's vowel phonology is much more complicated than Spanish or Japanese. One misconception that native English speakers have is they think their language is simple to pronounce, when it really isn't.