Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 June 15
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June 15
[edit]Alpha+Iota in Greek
[edit]In Greek, alpha+iota was supposed to sound like the i in ice. But somehow, the sound changed to the e in end. How did the sound change to strongly (the 2 sounds are clearly dissimilar)?? Georgia guy (talk) 01:24, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- The same thing has happened in English and French, as you can tell from the pronunciations of an "ai" or "ay" spelling in those languages. It's not difficult to understand if you consider it to be the averaging out of the tongue heights of the two halves of an [ai] diphthong, so that the low tongue height of the first half and the high tongue height of the second half become an overall mid tongue height. The Wikipedia article covering this is Monophthongization... -- AnonMoos (talk) 02:03, 15 June 2019 (UTC)