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For example, in Icelandic, both monophthongs and diphthongs are pronounced long before single consonants and short before most consonant clusters. Some languages contrast short and long diphthongs. In some languages, such as Old English, these behave like short and long vowels, occupying one and two morae, respectively.
A monophthong (/ ˈ m ɒ n ə f θ ɒ ŋ, ˈ m ɒ n ə p-/ MON-əf-thong, MON-əp-; from Ancient Greek μονόφθογγος (monóphthongos) 'one sound', [1] from μόνος (mónos) 'single' and φθόγγος (phthóngos) 'sound') is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at only beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of ...
The vowels of FLEECE and GOOSE are commonly pronounced as narrow diphthongs, approaching [ɪi] and [ʊu], in RP. Near-RP speakers may have particularly marked diphthongization of the type [əi] and [əu ~ əʉ], respectively. In General American, the pronunciation varies between a monophthong and a diphthong. [43]
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.
Monophthongization is a sound change by which a diphthong becomes a monophthong, a type of vowel shift. It is also known as ungliding , [ 1 ] [ 2 ] as diphthongs are also known as gliding vowels. In languages that have undergone monophthongization, digraphs that formerly represented diphthongs now represent monophthongs.
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. [125] 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.
/ɪə/ is shown here as a long monophthong [ɪː]. The vowels of Australian English can be divided according to length. The long vowels, which include monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to the tense vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as its centring diphthongs. The short vowels, consisting only of ...
All of the above diphthongs came about during the Middle English. Old English had a number of diphthongs, but all of them had been reduced to monophthongs in the transition to Middle English. Diphthongs in Middle English came about by various processes and at various time periods and tended to change their quality over time.