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Diphthongs contrast with monophthongs, where the tongue or other speech organs do not move and the syllable contains only a single vowel sound. For instance, in English, the word ah is spoken as a monophthong (/ ɑː /), while the word ow is spoken as a diphthong in most varieties (/ aʊ /).
A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. The orthography of Greek includes several digraphs, including various pairs of vowel letters that used to be pronounced as diphthongs but have been shortened to monophthongs in pronunciation.
In Welsh, the digraph ll fused for a time into a ligature.. A digraph (from Ancient Greek δίς (dís) 'double' and γράφω (gráphō) 'to write') or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
The long diphthongs /ɛːu̯ aːu̯ ɔːu̯/ occurred rarely. [41] The diphthongs /ei ou yi/ changed to /eː uː yː/ in the early Classical period in most cases, but /ei yi/ remained before vowels. In the tables below, the diphthongs that were monophthongized in most cases are preceded by an asterisk, and the rarer diphthongs are in parentheses.
ae is used in Irish for /eː/ between two "broad" consonants, e.g. Gael /ɡeːlˠ/ "a Gael". In Latin, ae originally represented the diphthong /ae/, before it was monophthongized in the Vulgar Latin period to /ɛ/; in medieval manuscripts, the digraph was frequently replaced by the ligature æ .
This arose because the two words were originally pronounced differently: pain used to be pronounced as /peɪn/, with a diphthong, and pane as /peːn/, but the diphthong /eɪ/ merged with the long vowel /eː/ in pane, making pain and pane homophones (pane–pain merger). Later /eː/ became a diphthong /eɪ/. break and brake: (She's breaking the ...
Where one word ended with a vowel (including the nasalized vowels written am em im um~(om) and the diphthong ae) and the next word began with a vowel, the former vowel, at least in verse, was regularly elided; that is, it was omitted altogether, or possibly (in the case of /i/ and /u/) pronounced like the corresponding semivowel.