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Narrow diphthongs are the ones that end with a vowel which on a vowel chart is quite close to the one that begins the diphthong, for example Northern Dutch [eɪ], [øʏ] and [oʊ]. Wide diphthongs are the opposite – they require a greater tongue movement, and their offsets are farther away from their starting points on the vowel chart.
In Old English, two forms of harmonic vowel breaking occurred: breaking and retraction and back mutation.. In prehistoric Old English, breaking and retraction changed stressed short and long front vowels i, e, æ to short and long diphthongs spelled io, eo, ea when followed by h or by r, l + another consonant (short vowels only), and sometimes w (only for certain short vowels): [3]
When ae makes the diphthong / eɪ / (lay) or / aɪ / (eye). When ae is found in a foreign phrase or loan word and it is unacceptable to use the ligature in that language. For example, when in a German loan word or phrase, if the a with an umlaut (ä) is written as ae , it is incorrect to write it with the ligature.
The falling diphthong /ɪw/ of due and dew changed to a rising diphthong, which became the sequence [juː]. The change did not occur in all dialects, however; see Yod-dropping. The diphthongs /əɪ/ and /əʊ/ of tide and house widened to /aɪ/ and /aʊ/, respectively. The diphthong /ʊɪ/ merged into /əɪ/ ~ /aɪ/.
Result in some dialects, for example Anglian, was back vowels rather than diphthongs. West Saxon ceald; but Anglian cald > ModE cold. Diphthong height harmonization: The height of one element of each diphthong is adjusted to match that of the other. /ɑi/ > /ɑː/ through this change, [6] possibly through an intermediate stage /ɑæ/.
A simplified diagram of Canadian raising (Rogers 2000:124).Actual starting points vary. Canadian raising (also sometimes known as English diphthong raising [1]) is an allophonic rule of phonology in many varieties of North American English that changes the pronunciation of diphthongs with open-vowel starting points.
In the transition to Middle English, the system underwent major changes by eliminating the diphthongs and leaving only one pair of low vowels but with a vowel distinction appearing in the long mid vowels: The diphthongs /æɑ̯/ /æːɑ̯/ simplified to /æ/ and /æː/, respectively. Subsequently, the low vowels were modified as follows:
Some languages do not have diphthongs, except sometimes in rapid speech, or they have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences that cannot form diphthongs and so appear in hiatus. That is the case of Japanese, Nuosu, Bantu languages like Swahili, and Lakota.