>I thought I had learned in grade school that diphthongs are consonant pairs
>that produce a sound different from their individual pronounciations (ph,
>gh, th...). When my kids were in grade school, I learned the new term
>'consonant blend' refered to the same definition. The term 'diphthong' was
>no longer in the lesson. My wife (the better student) remembers it that way
>too. We spoke of this in our children's grade school years.
>
>The Britannica link clearly describes 'diphthong' as a vowel function. Is
>this a case of morphing definitions since the 60's? I don't see how my wife
>and I could have both mistaken the lesson independantly, and in different
>schools.
>
>I know that history is rewritten constantly to serve the politically
>correct. What's going on here?
>
Always understood diphthong to be vowels only. There are the ones where the
second 'e' is 'glued' to the vowel and I suspect that this comes from the
German habit of replacing a umlaut accent with an 'e'. Americans simply
avoid them (as in foetus, fetus). But any double vowel is a diphthong,
isn't it? It's possible that your schools were simply wrong (I have
students who were taught in Primary School that 'a lot' is one word -
sometimes such things develop a life of their own).
Diphthongs were originally pronounced differently - you could hear both
vowels as in the modern Northumbrian pronunciation of boat as bo-at. 'Th'
is modern - Old English had actual letters for soft 'th' (thorn) and hard
'th' (the).
AndrewF
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