DIPHTONG

A dipthong is a unitary vowel that changes quality during its pronunciation from one
articulation to another.
Diphthongs are types of vowels where two vowel sounds are connected in a
continuous, gliding motion. They are often referred to as gliding vowels. Most
languages have a number of diphthongs, although that number varies widely, from
only one or two to fifteen or more.

A vowel is a specific type of sound, characterized by a lack of full obstruction to the
air flow. Vowels can be contrasted with consonants, where there is such an
obstruction. As air comes out when you are speaking a consonant, there is a build
up of pressure as the air flow is constricted. When speaking a vowel, there is no built
up pressure, the sound is simply shaped by the position of the tongue.

Vowels are generally characterized by three different criteria: the position of the
tongue in the mouth relative to the roof of the mouth (height), the position of the
tongue in either the front or back of the mouth (backness), and the shape of the lips
as the vowel sound is being made (roundedness). There are other things that may
characterize vowels, but they are not very common in English things such as the
position of the root of the tongue, for example, rarely affect English vowels, though
they affect the vowels in many African languages.

When vowels come together, they may either be two distinct syllables, or may merge
into one syllable. When they merge, they form what are known as diphthongs. If they
stay separate they are simply two monophthongs. An example of two single syllable
vowels can be seen in the word triage, in which the i and the a are both pronounced
on their own. An example of a diphthong can be seen in the word mouse, in which
the ou part of the word obviously consists of two distinct vowels, but there is no
syllabic break between the two.

Diphthongs can usually be seen as having two distinct parts the nucleus, and the
off-glide. The nucleus of the diphthong is the vowel that is most stressed, and forms
the center of the sound, while the off-glide is the vowel which seems to flow into or
off of the nucleus vowel.

The three major diphthongs in Standard English, which are known as phonemic
diphthongs, are ai, aw, and oy. All three of these diphthongs are very common, and
many people simply think of them as single vowels in some contexts. For example,
in the English word ride, the i would be transcribed phonetically as ai. Although it
appears as a single letter in our writing, it actually consists of two vowels if you
say the word you should be able to hear the two. Similarly, the word how contains
the diphthong aw at the end, and the word boy contains the diphthong oy.

Other diphthongs in Standard English are the ei sound in the word fame or the
pronunciation of the letter a, and the ou sound in the word phone. Other languages
have many more diphthongs aside from these, and other dialects of English may
have more diphthongs as well. Languages such as Finnish have nearly twenty
diphthongs, while the Received Pronunciation dialect of English has an extra five or
so diphthongs not found in Standard English.
In addition to diphthongs and monophthongs, there are also what are called
triphthongs. These are similar to diphthongs, but instead of moving simply from one
vowel sound to another, a third sound is also added.

Types of diphthongs

Falling (or descending) diphthongs start with a vowel quality of higher prominence
(higher pitch or louder) and end in a semivowel with less prominence, like [at ] in
"eye", while rising (or ascending) diphthongs begin with a less prominent semivowel
and end with a more prominent full vowel, like [t a] in "yard". The less prominent
component in the diphthong may also be transcribed as an approximant, thus [aj] in
"eye" and [ja] in "yard". However, when the diphthong is analysed as a single
phoneme, both elements are often transcribed with vowel letters (/at /, /t a/). Note also
that semivowels and approximants are not equivalent in all treatments, and in the
English and Italian languages, among others, many phoneticians do not consider
rising combinations to be diphthongs, but rather sequences of approximant and
vowel. There are many languages (such as Romanian) that contrast one or more
rising diphthongs with similar sequences of a glide and a vowel in their phonetic
inventory.[3]

n closing diphthongs, the second element is more close than the first (e.g. [ai]); in
opening diphthongs, more open (e.g. [ia]). Closing diphthongs tend to be falling ([ai]),
and opening diphthongs are generally rising ([ia]), because open vowels are more
sonorous and therefore tend to be more prominent. However, exceptions to this rule
are not rare in the world's languages. n Finnish, for instance, the opening
diphthongs /ie / and /uo / are true falling diphthongs, since they begin louder and with
higher pitch and fall in prominence during the diphthong.

A centering diphthong is one that begins with a more peripheral vowel and ends with
a more central one, such as [te ], [se ], and [ue ] in Received Pronunciation or [ie ] and
[ue ] in Irish. Many centering diphthongs are also opening diphthongs ([ie ], [ue ]).

Some languages contrast short and long diphthongs, the latter usually being
described as having a long first element. Languages that contrast three quantities in
diphthongs are extremely rare, but not unheard of: Northern Sami is known to
contrast long, short and finally stressed diphthongs, the last of which are
distinguished by a long second element.







LIST OF DIPHTONGS WORDS
ou
coat, boat, cold, home, comb, though, thorough, stole, bowl, old, roll, toe, no,
go, slow

iu
fume, cute, you, newt, new, knew (variant of "nu"), huge, pure, therapeutic,
Cuba, nuisance, beautiful, queue

ei
face, raise, amazing, straight, hate, baby, blas, bouquet, gaelic, feign, paper,
later, neighbor, gauge, potato, tomato, gray, they

ai
fine, behind, child, line, kind, mind, silent, giro, guide, guy, eye, I, my, light,
paradigm, sigh, island, aisle, psyche

au
foul, about, flower, house, out, how, now, allow, plough, route, ouch!

oi
foil, boy, toil, voice, Reuters, enjoy

u
truer, sewer, bluer, doer, dual, jewel

u
one, wonder, worry, once

ia
piano, theatrical, Seattle, meander
TRIPHTONG
Definition of triphthong
n. - A combination of three vowel sounds in a single syllable, forming a simple or
compound sound; also, a union of three vowel characters, representing together a
single sound; a trigraph; as, eye, -ieu in adieu, -eau in beau, are examples of
triphthongs.
Some authors describe the English vowel system as including not only diphthongs
but also triphthongs. Peter Roach (English Phonetics and Phonology, 4th ed., CUP
2009, p. 18-19) puts it like this:
The most complex English sounds of the vowel type are the triphthongs. They can
be rather difficult to pronounce, and very difficult to recognise. A triphthong is a glide
from one vowel to another and then to a third, all produced rapidly and without
interruption.
He lists the triphthongs e, a, , , a (later giving the example words layer,
player; liar, fire; loyal, royal; lower, mower; power, hour) and continues
The principal cause of difficulty for the foreign learner is that in present-day English
the extent of the vowel movement is very small, except in very careful pronunciation.
Because of this, the middle of the three vowel qualities of the triphthong (i.e. the or
part) can hardly be heard and the resulting sound is difficult to distinguish from
some of the diphthongs and long vowels. To add to the difficulty, there is also the
problem of whether a triphthong is felt to contain one or two syllables. Words such as
fire or hour are probably felt by most English speakers (with BBC pronunciation) to
consist of only one syllable, whereas player ple or slower sl are more likely
to be heard as two syllables.

I find this account unsatisfactory. If the of slower is a triphthong, it is difficult to
see any reason why the of going is not one too. If liar has a triphthong, surely
trying must have one.
More to the point, a diphthong is not any old movement or glide from one vowel to
another (Roachs definition, p. 17). A word like neon nin certainly has a
movement or glide from one vowel to another, but does not contain a diphthong,
because it has two syllables. A diphthong is a vowel glide within a single syllable.
Ashby and Maidment (Introducing Phonetic Science, CUP 2005, p. 8) put it like this:
Since voice and house are one-syllable words, English diphthongs must count as
one V element rather than two. Both voice and house have the structure CVC, rather
than CVVC.
Similarly, I would argue that part of the definition of a true triphthong must be that it
constitutes a single V unit, making with any associated consonants just a single
syllable.
Given that, do we have triphthongs in English? I claim that generally, at the phonetic
level, we dont. treat the items we are discussing as basically sequences of a strong
vowel plus a weak vowel. (By strong vowel mean one that is stressable and the
potential input to a weakening rule; by weak vowel mean one that is the potential
output of a weakening rule. Diphthongs such as a are included under the heading
strong vowel.)
These sequences are subject to two possible processes: smoothing and
compression. Smoothing means the loss of the second part of the strong vowel
(diphthong). Compression means the squashing of the two syllables into one
syllable. Both of these processes are optional (or stylistically determined).
Hence given the disyllabic starting point pa. power, we can smooth it to disyllabic
pa.. We can then compress the result to give monosyllabic pa. (This may be
subject to the further process of Monophthonging, giving pa.)
Similarly, . going can be smoothed to . and then compressed to .
If my definition of triphthong holds, then a triphthong would be generated only if we
apply Compression without first applying Smoothing. And my claim is that we do not
commonly do that.

References:
http://askville.amazon.com/diphthongsexamples/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=13543
669. Accessed on 6 March 2011.
http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2009/12/triphthongs-anyone.html. Accessed on
6 March 2011.