triphthongs i

it's basically still monday for me i promise

I’d like to think I mostly understand how my variety of the English language works. I hesitate to say that I understand how language works in general—I think the study of language models hasn’t gotten anywhere close to fully answering that question. But insofar as the question is about something peculiar to the structure of English, rather than about the details of why a rich vocabulary of symbols can work as a way to describe a complicated and messy reality or about complicated social dynamics that can influence the usage of words—well, I can give a reasonably thorough account of English grammar and such, though I may need to google for a piece of academic vocabulary from time to time.

But I remain pretty confused about what I should say if you ask me how many syllables ire, our, owl, oil, while, or snarl have. I’m a little iffy on near, steal, ale, and cool too, but I’m a little more willing to go with a solid “one” on them.

Ultimately the answer is going to be that “syllable” isn’t a perfect abstraction, but the intuition strongly indoctrinated into me by my culture is that I should be able to look at any word or other portion of English speech, write down each sound in it, and then split those sounds among several syllables, maybe with it occasionally being too complicated to justify a definitive stance on whether some consonant is the end of one syllable or the start of the next¹¹ I can imagine linking r being a troubling case, though I don’t have it in my dialect.

It’s a sound which, most of the time, is inserted between two words, neither of which would have the sound on their own—but it can also occur in, say, drawing.

But people like to call it “intrusive r” whenever it happens in a context that isn’t “after a word that ends in <r>”. So… maybe it goes with the first word?

But if someone were inserting a ʔ to resolve hiatus between two words, I'd be inclined to put that with the second word, since it would sort of be… taking the place of an initial consonant? And at least with so-called intrusive r, that’s mostly what’s happening….

Now, sometimes words can be pronounced in multiple different ways. This isn’t very confusing. I am not very disturbed by the difference between res•taur•ant /rɛs.tɚ.rɑnt/ and res•taurant /rɛʃ.tʃrɑnt/, though I can easily imagine a less enlightened language user being befuddled by the syllable “chrant” being spelt “taurant”²² Are the ghoti people even taureighing? You can do so much worse than ghoti.. But this mostly isn’t my issue with ire. Words like that one have a more complicated problem.

The exact way I characterize this issue in my head has changed a little over time. Maybe the most obvious way to put it is something like “diphthongs before liquids”, where a “liquid” is basically either l or r. This gets most of them, but not snarl, even though it has… basically the same issue?

I notice that r has some significant limitations on what vowels it can follow, for me. I pretty much have /ɑr/, /er/, /ir/, and /or/. Any other monophthongs merged into one of those—or into /ɚ/—before r. It’s remarkably similar to the set of vowels that can occur in a diphthong that ends near a y sound, actually. The analogies continue: I actually say the word start something like [stɐrt], which is clearly analogous to Canadian raising. So maybe it makes sense to see these as sort of like diphthongs. We can then say that snarl is a diphthong before an l, problem solved. But wait, then what are we saying about ire?

This is why I referred to this sort of word a triphthong when talking with Celene once, more as a joke than a serious take—though non-rhotic accents sometimes have an [ə] where I have a [r], and those are often called triphthongs by serious people who are less prone to distorting their terminology for humor than I.

This issue with saying “triphthongs” is that it requires arguing that l, too, is a vowel, but I’m prepared to accept this—if we’re talking about when it happens after the vowel in a syllable, anyways. Celene is convinced that it is pretty much the same thing as an o—I think it’s more complicated than that, but I have not found simple answers about the “dark l”—I don’t think it’s just velarization, I don’t think it’s coronal at all. I am rather far from totally sure that it isn’t just a vowel, or at least not that much further from being a vowel than /w/ is.

I am going to defend the idea of characterizing these as triphthongs. And then tomorrow we can actually stare at the triphthongs in a little more detail, because even if it’s after midnight and even if I did mention that I still mostly think of after midnight as the same day if I haven’t slept yet in the first post this month, there’s only so far I’m willing to push it!

Okay, here’s a question: does the word bowing have the w sound in it? I mean like bowing after a performance, not like bowing a cello.

How about about? Drought? Sour? Power? Round?

Well, “the w sound” is maybe a little ambiguous in some ways. Any letter that gets too mixed up with how English spells its vowels can start getting a little weird, because English’s system for vowel spelling is very… path-dependent. But mostly people think w makes like, the sound in way, or we, or will. You know, IPA /w/.

So, Wiktionary gives /ˈbaʊɪŋ/, /əˈbaʊt/, /dɹaʊt/³³ This should definitely start with /dʒr/ for lots of younger speakers though., /ˈsaʊɚ/⁴⁴ That sure is three vowels next to each other!, /ˈpaʊ̯.ɚ/, /ˈɹaʊnd/. So it likes spelling this vowel with /aʊ/, and explicitly marked the /ʊ/ with the semivowel⁵⁵ Or “nonsyllabic vowel”, if you think that’s different from a semivowel. symbol when transcribing power in particular, for some reason. This is definitely the most common way of doing it.

Does guy end in a y sound, like the one in yes, /j/? Why? Does style have one? Wide? White? Dire? These are /ɡaɪ/, /waɪ/, /staɪl/, /waɪd/, /waɪt/, /ˈdaɪ̯ə(ɹ)/. So /aɪ/, also normal, also explicitly a semivowel once before an r, for some reason.

Writing the bow sound with an /ʊ/ just seems rather odd to me. Like, the vowel in put and look? As a semivowel? The first vowel isn’t exactly an [a], it's substantially fronter than /aɪ/ and seems pretty close to how I usually pronounce /æ/ to me. But rounding an open vowel to /a/ in a diphthong seems mostly fine to me if there’s only one open-to-high-back diphthong in the language, so whatever. The /ʊ/, though? Why are we distinguishing it from /u/?

But the thing is, /u̯/ is a kind of silly thing to write unless you are trying to draw some really fine distinction. There is already a symbol for “a sound that’s pretty much /u/, but isn’t syllabic.” That’s /w/, which also occurs orthographically a bunch of the time. So if I were making up the standard for how to transcribe this diphthong myself, I might go with /æw/ or /aw/. I usually do just use /aw/—it’s maybe marginally less standard, but it’s not too uncommon.

The situation for guy is pretty much the same. I’m a little more willing to say that the first vowel is pretty close to an [a]. It’s definitely substantially further back than the first vowel in though. (And also it’s higher in certain contexts.)

The Wikipedia page for diphthongs says:

Transcribing the English diphthongs in high and cow as ⟨aj aw⟩ or ⟨ai̯au̯⟩ is a less precise or broader transcription, since these diphthongs usually end in a vowel sound that is more open than the semivowels [j w] or the close vowels [i u]. Transcribing the diphthongs as ⟨aɪ̯ aʊ̯⟩ is a more precise or narrower transcription, since the English diphthongs usually end in the near-close vowels [ɪ ʊ].

And, like, gee, I suppose I can’t rule out that they’re near-close vowels in some objective sense, but I’m pretty sure they’re closer to the /i/ in eat or the /u/ in route than the /ɪ/ in in or the /ʊ/ in book, as far as I can tell. Trying to actually end a diphthong with my /ɪ/ or /ʊ/ feels very weird.

And really /æw/ seems much closer than /aʊ/, insofar as I care about narrowness!

But I think it’s pretty reasonable to still call them diphthongs, even if we use a semivowel symbol. And the other approximants feel more similar to semivowels than distinct from them, in a lot of ways—sometimes people even seriously argue for counting /ɹ/ as a semivowel. So I think “whether it’s a monopthong, diphthong, or triphthong depends on how many approximants go after the most prominent vowel” seems not too ridiculous—presuming you don’t want to say that approximants before the most prominent vowel count, anyways. Which seems reasonable, any of the four approximants can pretty much go before any vowel—not that I’ve thoroughly checked every single pairing.

I feel like I could actually prune my vowel phoneme list quite a lot, if I wanted. Diphthongs are syllables that end with /j/ and /w/. There’s not really that big a difference between the vowels in boy, /boj/, and bow (like for a cello), /bow/—they both basically start at /o/, one goes in the /i/ direction, and one goes in the /u/ direction. Bye and bow (down) similarly go to /j/ and /w/, and start with a low vowel. We could say they're /a/, but if I’m trying to prune symbols it seems not ridiculous to go with /ɑj/ and /æw/—maybe /ɑ/ is a little broad, but it’s not that broad. Long a could be /ɛj/, though it is probably closer to [ej]. If we’re being spicy, we could go with /ɪj/ and /ʊw/ instead of /i/ and /u/, but I think this makes more sense in other dialects where the vowel starts closer to /ɪ/ or /ʊ/—even if it’s not like there are minimal pairs or anything.

So I can almost make it work without actually losing any distinctions using just /æ ɛ ɪ ɑ ɔ ʊ ə ɚ/, and then letting /j w/ happen at the end of syllables, and using /ɔj/ and /ɔw/ instead of the maybe closer /oj/ and /ow/. And I only even need /ɚ/ because I both stubbornly insist that /ɚ/ sounds nothing at all like /ər/ would and refuse to transcribe “rural” as /rr.l/.

There’s a few issues, though. If I weren’t trying to cut it down as much as possible, I would mostly be inclined to write palm, bald, and bold as /pɑlm/, /bɔld/, and /bold/. Now, I’ve almost entirely merged my cot and caught vowels before l—the only exceptions I’ve been able to come up with are /pɑlm/, which is sort of a spelling pronunciation thing, and /ɑl/, a partially reduced form of I’ll. I’m not really willing to actually collapse the minimal pair I’ll and all, which would allow /bɑld/ for bald and /bɔld/ for bold, even if I usually say I’ll as /ɑjl/ or maybe /əl/ anyways. It’s collapsing the distinction in the wrong direction, the vowel in all is the one from caught, not the one from cot.

So what you’d actually have to do is write /bɔld/ for bald and /bɔwld/ for bold. And I just like, can't do that. Like, yeah, I guess bowled sure is a homophone and /boʊld/ is a more common transcription than /bold/ anyways, but it’s just—clearly a single vowel and then an l, there’s not two vowels before the l.

After pursuing lines of thought like that, I sometimes end up left feeling like I have a phoneme /o/ that can only occur in /oj/, /ow/, /or/, and /ol/: toy, tow, tore, toll. You could maybe say something similar about /e/, except instead of /ew/ I have /eə/, and /ejl/ feels a little more reasonable than /owl/ does. Something like /al/ for I’ll actually kind of comes from clipping the /j/ off in I and replacing it with an l, as opposed to adding the l to the end; the issue is that the diphthongs which start low do feel a lot more like /æw/ and /ɑr/ than like /aw/ and /ar/. But maybe it’s worth noting that not quite so many vowels merge before /l/ as before /j/, /w/, or /r/.