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One of the things I like about the cyrillic alphabet is that it has symbols for diphtongs. Portuguese (my native toungue) fixes this with diacritics (melancia,

One of the things I like about the cyrillic alphabet is that it has symbols for diphtongs. Portuguese (my native toungue) fixes this with diacritics (melancia, and distância - the diacritic wouldn't be necessary if the 'ia' in distância used a symbol to indicate it is a diphtong). French mixes vowels up in lots of different ways and English spelling is a mess. Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. Mind you, I am not a linguist.

teilo 9y ago
Technically Latin has had many symbols for dipthongs, but in practice only two became common: Æ and Œ. They are usually classified as ligatures, but that's not technically correct in this case.
munificent 9y ago
> Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. That is also challenging though because you run into a lot of cases where a syllable is a diphthong in one regional accent, but not another. For example, in Southern US English, "ride" is often pronounced something like "rahd". In the former, the "i" is a diphthong, but in the latter, the "ah" is not. Conversely, some vowels become dipthongs. A short "i" in Southern accents often gets pronounced more like "ee-uh". Imagine Foghorn Leghorn saying "pin" as "pi-uhn" and you've got the idea.
- PeanutNore 9y ago
  Here (Pittsburgh) the vowel in "down" or "town" is a monophthong instead of a diphthong like it is pretty much everywhere else. I wonder if part of the reason for the diversity of regional accents in English is because pronunciation is more loosely encoded than in languages that have more vowel symbols or modifying marks, or strict phonetic pronunciation. Written English doesn't really provide many strong indicators that a particular pronunciation isn't standard.
- int_19h 9y ago
  It's a problem with phonetic spelling in general, not specifically with diphthongs.

teilo 9y ago

Technically Latin has had many symbols for dipthongs, but in practice only two became common: Æ and Œ. They are usually classified as ligatures, but that's not technically correct in this case.

munificent 9y ago

> Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. That is also challenging though because you run into a lot of cases where a syllable is a diphthong in one regional accent, but not another. For example, in Southern US English, "ride" is often pronounced something like "rahd". In the former, the "i" is a diphthong, but in the latter, the "ah" is not. Conversely, some vowels become dipthongs. A short "i" in Southern accents often gets pronounced more like "ee-uh". Imagine Foghorn Leghorn saying "pin" as "pi-uhn" and you've got the idea.

PeanutNore 9y ago
Here (Pittsburgh) the vowel in "down" or "town" is a monophthong instead of a diphthong like it is pretty much everywhere else. I wonder if part of the reason for the diversity of regional accents in English is because pronunciation is more loosely encoded than in languages that have more vowel symbols or modifying marks, or strict phonetic pronunciation. Written English doesn't really provide many strong indicators that a particular pronunciation isn't standard.
int_19h 9y ago
It's a problem with phonetic spelling in general, not specifically with diphthongs.