{"id":452,"date":"2008-12-19T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2008-12-19T18:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/dipthong\/"},"modified":"2008-12-19T12:01:19","modified_gmt":"2008-12-19T18:01:19","slug":"dipthong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/12\/dipthong\/","title":{"rendered":"“Dipthong”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I heard someone say this the other day.<\/p>\n

Problem:<\/strong>
\nThis is a mispronunciation that often is tied to a misspelling.<\/p>\n

Explanation:<\/strong>
\nThe correct noun is “diphthong” — spelled D-I-P-H-T-H-O-N-G — which dates back to the mid-1400s and means a monosyllabic, gliding speech sound that varies continuously but that is considered to be a single phoneme<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The word “diphthong” is formed from the prefix “di”, which means two<\/em>, and the Greek word “phthongos”, which means voice or sound<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Examples of diphthongs include the vowel combination at the end of “toy” and the vowel combination in “boil”.<\/p>\n

I believe that the mispronunciation of “diphthong” could come from misspelling it as D-I-P-T-H-O-N-G because it is extremely rare in English to have P-H followed by T-H.<\/p>\n

Or the misspelling of “diphthong” could come from the mispronunciation of it, again because of the rarity in English of having P-H followed by T-H.<\/p>\n

The correct pronunciation is obtained by recognizing that P-H in “diphthong” has an F sound.<\/p>\n

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:<\/p>\n