LECTURE 4
ENGLISH LONG VOWELS, DIPHTHONGS, TRIPHTHONGS
How are English long vowels different from English short vowels?
Quality = tongue shape and position and lip position
Thus, long vowels have a symbols which are different from those of short vowels; you can see that
the long and short vowel symbols would still all be different from each other even if we omitted the
length mark
Length mark is used since it helps learners to remember the length difference.
Perhaps the only case where a long and a short vowel are closely similar in quality is that of [ə] and
[ɜ:].
Examples of English long vowels:
Comparison of Slovak and English long vowels (Ološtiak, 2007, p. 52):
Diphthong is
Pure vowels is
The most important thing to remember about diphthongs is that
Diphthongs (Roach, 2009, p.17)
Centring diphthongs
Centring diphthongs examples:
Closing diphthongs:
Closing diphtongs ending in [ɪ] examples:
Closing diphtongs ending in [ʊ] examples
Triphthong
Examples of triphthongs
List of resources:
Cruttenden, A. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. Hodder Education, 2008.
Crystal, D. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Blackvell Publishing, 2008.
Davenport M. – Hannahs S. Introducing Phonetics and Phonology. Hodder Arnold, 2005.
Ološtiak, M. Jayykovoštruktúrny a komunikačno-pragmatický status vlastného mena (adaptácia
anglických proprií v slovenčine. FF PU v Prešove, 2007.
Richards, J. – Schmidt, R. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics.
Longman, 2010.
Roach, P. English Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Underhill, A. Learning and teaching pronunciation. Macmillan, 2005.