Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2025 September 28
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September 28
[edit]Diphthongs
[edit]Do Japanese, French, Swedish and Russian have diphthongs? Articles about these languages do not mention that they have any diphthongs. But I think that the ai in kanpai in Japanese is a diphthong, as wellas aï in maïs in French, oj in pojke in Swedish and ей in Russian Алексей are diphthongs. Is this so? --40bus (talk) 00:25, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
- In Japanese, ai is effectively a dipthong, but it might not be perceived as such by native speakers, but rather as two distinct vowels that are adjacent. And in sung Japanese each one gets enunciated on its own and with equal timing, more or less.
- The long-vowel forms of e and o are basically dipthongs, though: e is lengthened with i (as ei) and o is lengthened with u (as ou - so Tokyo, if transliterated literally would be Toukyou). 76.20.114.184 (talk) 00:56, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
- Is that how ei, ou are genuinely pronounced, or is the kana spelling an archaism? —Tamfang (talk) 22:57, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- I wouldn't say that, in my impression they're rather pronounced something like e:' and o:' , but others might have better knowledge than me. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:14, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
- See Heisei as an example. I always thought I heard the I being pronounced (and I'd still think so based on the audio file) but the IPA says otherwis. -- 2A02:8424:6281:D401:A85B:5BDC:2E8:6C2E (talk) 09:16, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
- I wouldn't say that, in my impression they're rather pronounced something like e:' and o:' , but others might have better knowledge than me. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:14, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
- Is that how ei, ou are genuinely pronounced, or is the kana spelling an archaism? —Tamfang (talk) 22:57, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- The difference between a diphthong and a sequence of vowel plus semivowel isn't always very clear. Neither is the difference between a diphthong and a sequence of two vowels in separate syllables. Or the difference between a diphthong with a very small change in tongue position and a monophthong, and such diphthongs often occur only in some dialects. So it may be that you hear a diphthong, but there are reasons to threat them as something else. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:45, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
- A rule that sometimes works is that two adjacent vowel sounds in a word do not morphologically form a diphthong but belong to separate syllables when (in some context) they have a difference in pitch due to (word, lexical or prosodic) stress. ‑‑Lambiam 10:37, 28 September 2025 (UTC) An example is Japanese サイロ (sairo), which has a downstep between the [á] and [ì]. ‑‑Lambiam 09:09, 30 September 2025 (UTC)