DIPHTHONGS

TABLE OF DIPHTHONGS

On the following diagram indicate with an arrow the movement of the tongue for the diphthongs in the given words. Give a phonetic transcription first.

Do the same thing for the triphthongs in the words:

TABLE OF VOWELS As we saw above, the best way of noting the tongue position is by using the vowel diagrams, but as they do not contain information about length and rounding, we can summarize the description of English vowels in the following table:

Phonemes Mark and Mary Brown are both doctors in the same hospital. One of them is a physician, the other is a biologist. When an invitation addressed to Dr M. Brown arrives, the secretary of the hospital wants to know which Dr Brown is invited. She asks a collegue: Whos the physician? The answer is:She is. Hence it is Mary whos invited. Had the answer been He is, it would have been Mark. This important information is conveyed by a single segment of the utterance. If we transcribe the two possible answers in phonetic symbols, we get:

Consider the following sentence:

If we change the first consonant of the noun cat and insert [ h] instead we get the sentence

Minimal Pairs

1. Find the phonetic symbol for the first sound in each of the following words: a. this b. usual c. church d. christian e. thousand f. psychology g. knee h. hear i. phonetics j. giant k. one