Although the word " on " is sometimes translated as " syllable ", one on is counted for a short syllable, two for an elongated vowel, diphthong, or doubled consonant, and one for an " n " at the end of a syllable.

* A long syllable ( one that contains a long vowel or a diphthong, or ends in a consonant ) with a main stress is metrically strong.

This form is colloquially termed the " long o " as in boat in English, but it is actually most often a diphthong ( realized dialectically anywhere from to ).

* In many American dialects with the cot – caught merger, occurs only before and ( and in the diphthong if this is not interpreted as a single phoneme ).

Almost regularly, a plain iota is replaced by the epsilon-iota diphthong ( commonly if imprecisely known as itacism ), e. g. ΔΑΥΕΙΔ instead οf ΔΑΥΙΔ, ΠΕΙΛΑΤΟΣ instead of ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ, ΦΑΡΕΙΣΑΙΟΙ instead of ΦΑΡΙΣΑΙΟΙ, etc.

ward ), and the diphthong au is the regular outcome of al before a following consonant ( cf.

gamba > jambe ), and the diphthong au would be unexplained ; the regular outcome of Latin Gallia is Jaille in French which is found in several western placenames.

* The diphthong is pronounced approximately, but wide variation exists, especially between social classes in Belfast

* In Belfast, is a monophthong in open syllables ( e. g. day ) but a rising diphthong in closed syllables ( e. g. daze ).

Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel.

Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables — for example, in the English word re-elect — the result is described as hiatus, not as a diphthong.

The non-syllabic diacritic ( an inverted breve below, ⟨⟩) can be placed under the less prominent component to show that it is part of a diphthong rather than a separate vowel.

However, when the diphthong is analysed as a single phoneme, both elements are often transcribed with vowel letters (, ).

A third, rare type of diphthong that is neither opening nor closing is height-harmonic diphthongs, with both elements at the same vowel height.

A centering diphthong is one that begins with a more peripheral vowel and ends with a more central one, such as,, and in Received Pronunciation or and in Irish.

The diaeresis ( ä, ë, ö ) is normally used to show that a short vowel is to be separately pronounced, that it is not silent or part of a diphthong.

It can act as a carrier for a vowel with no preceding consonant, that is, a word-initial vowel or the second part of a diphthong ; when it carries a sukun, it indicates gemination ( lengthening ) of the following consonant ; and if alifu + sukun occurs at the end of a word, it indicates that the word ends in / eh /.

The Old Norse letter á is retained, but has become a diphthong, pronounced in Icelandic and in Faroese.

The diphthong * eu generally becomes ia, and Germanic * iu is retained.

But the diphthong is retained before inflectional endings, so that board and pause can contrast with bored and paws.

* Reduction of certain diphthong forms to monophthongs, in particular, is monophthongized to except before unvoiced consonants ( this is also a feature of many Southern American English dialects ).

: Further explanation: The diphthong becomes the monophthong in some environments including before nasals ( e. g., downtown ), liquids ( e. g., fowl, hour ) and obstruents ( e. g., house, out, cloudy ).

Giveaway features include the characteristic pronunciation of the diphthong in words like " cow ", which is more closed and rounded than in Received Pronunciation or General American ; the pronunciation of the strut vowel ( again, more closed than the RP or GenAm version, though not as closed as in the Creole ); semi-rhoticity, i. e. the dropping of the "- r " in words like " water " ( at the end of unstressed syllables ) and " market " ( before a consonant ); but not in words like " car " or " dare " ( stressed syllables at the end of the word ).

In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing ( or daseîa: modern Greek δασεία dasía ; Latin spīritus asper ), is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, diphthong, or rho.

The Latin diphthong appeared both in native words ( where it was spelled with ai before the 2nd century BC ) and in borrowings from Greek words having the diphthong αι ( alpha iota ).

If it has more than one stroke before ' ter ' et al., or has a hook at the end ( tender ), or a joined diphthong ( pewter ), then doubling principle is employed.

* the coil – curl merger of the phonemes and, creating the diphthong, before a consonant, in words such as boil, oil, and spoil, although this feature has mostly receded, except St. Bernard Parish

Iotation is an appearance of palatal approximant before a vowel at the beginning of a word or between two vowels in the middle of a word, creating a diphthongoid ( a partial diphthong ).

ward ), and the diphthong au is the regular outcome of al before a following consonant ( cf.

In Israeli Hebrew transcription, a vowel before yud at the end of a word or before yud then shewa naẖ inside a word, is transcribed as a diphthong ( ai oi ui )— see the diphthongs section further down.

In Old West Norse, the second element of the diphthong was lowered before a dental or alveolar consonant or / m /, transforming the diphthong to / jo :/, e. g. Old Icelandic bjóða " to offer ".

This is a prototypical example of the narrow sense of " vowel breaking " as described above: The original vowel breaks into a diphthong that assimilates to the following consonant, gaining a front before a palatal consonant and before a velar consonant.

While the apostrophe which joins the two parts of this word ordinarily indicates a glottal stop, most speakers pronounce this with a diphthong, so that the second syllable of the word rhymes with English ' nine ' ( as in the older spelling Tanaina ).

For example, Japanese allows short nouns ( 1-4 moras ) to have tone on any one mora, but more frequently on none at all, so that in disyllabic words there are three-way minimal contrasts such as káki " oyster " vs. kakí " fence " vs. kaki " persimmon "); Ancient Greek in contrast had obligatory tone on one of three final moras, so that if the tonic syllable had a long vowel or diphthong, it had either a rising or a falling tone.

Short diphthong has thus turned to diphonemic sequence, and long to disyllabic ( triphonemic ), but that process is not yet completely finished in most Štokavian dialects, so the pronunciation of long yat in Neo-Štokavian dialects can be both monosyllabic ( diphthongal or triphthongal ) and disyllabic ( triphonemic ).

Also, when a word beginning with ⟨ у ⟩ follows a vowel, so that it forms a diphthong through liaison, it is usually, but not necessary, written with ⟨ ў ⟩ instead.

This phenomenon never gained universal acceptance, however, so that while forms with the diphthong came to be accepted as standard Italian ( e. g. fuoco, buono, nuovo ), the monophthong remains in popular speech ( foco, bono, novo ).

* Diaeresis ( linguistics ) or Hiatus, two adjacent vowels, in adjacent syllables, not separated by a consonant or pause and not merged into a diphthong

It can also be used to " break up " a diphthong as in tío ( pronounced, rather than as it would be without the accent ).

Without the diacritic, the sequence can represent either a diphthong () or two vowels in hiatus ().

It can also be used to " break up " a diphthong or to avoid what would otherwise be homonyms, although this does not happen with á, because a is a strong vowel and usually does not become a semivowel in a diphthong.

Elsewhere it represents ' ses ' ( the vowel in the middle can be any of the vowel or diphthong ( crisis, crises and exercise ).

A large number of tricks are employed to make writing more compact: shading a vowel at the beginning of the stroke denotes that it is preceded by an r ; shading the whole stroke denotes a diphthong, while shading the end of the stroke denotes a following r. An l can be indicated by making the outline of the preceding letter smaller, and a following w by deepening the curve of the preceding stroke.

It can be followed by a consonant ( chrbtica " spine "), a vowel ( chémia " chemistry ") or diphthong ( chiazmus " chiasmus ").