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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]
A short diphthong had the same length as a short single vowel, and a long diphthong had the same length as a long single vowel. [124] As with monophthongs, their length was not systematically marked in Old English manuscripts, but is inferred from other evidence, such as a word's etymological origins or the pronunciation of its descendants.
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.
In Greek synaeresis, two vowels merge to form a long version of one of the two vowels (e.g. e + a → ā), a diphthong with a different main vowel (e.g. a + ei → āi), or a new vowel intermediate between the originals (e.g. a + o → ō). Contraction of e + o or o + e leads to ou, and e + e to ei, which are in this case spurious diphthongs.
Word-final and word-initial vowels. Any of the vowels can be found in this position. Vowel sequences. Doubled vowels Usually only the vowels /ɑ, æ, i, y, u/ are doubled. Sometimes the mid vowels /e, o, ø/ can be doubled in cases of contraction. Diphthongs Of the 18 diphthongs, 15 are formed from any vowel followed by a close vowel.
Also, the Early West Saxon diphthongs ie and īe developed into what is known as "unstable i", merging into /y(ː)/ in Late West Saxon. For further detail, see Old English diphthongs. All of the remaining Old English diphthongs were monophthongised in the early Middle English period: see Middle English stressed vowel changes.
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.