Coyote & Crow Forum

"There are no diphthongs in Chahi"
"a as in may"

I'm confused. The a in "May" is a diphthong in both standard American English and British English. I mean, I guess the ay is a dipthong, but trying to pull the a out separately is... weird? That feels like a less than helpful example.

"t as in tree" is kind of a weird choice, too, since "tree" is pronounced almost like "chree" and trying to pull a standalone t sound from the word is even more strange and counterintuitive than the above. Unless the t is meant to always be borderline on the "ch" sound, in which case, that might be better if it's spelled out more explicitly?

I might be overthinking things here, but I would appreciate a bit of clarity before I make an ass of myself by pronouncing a bunch of stuff wrong/weird.

These are great notes, particularly on "may." You're absolutely right that that that's usually a dipthong (eɪ). But in many American dialects, it's in fact a single vowel sound (e:). It's also pronounced that way in Scots english. Specifically, that a represents the close-mid front unrounded vowel, which you can hear here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid ... ded_vowel. The t is just your standard t sound - I'll pick another example word to clarify.

Awesome, thanks for the quick answer.

Also, this is a great example of how a language can have a ton of variations, dialects, and accents that change how things sound, so making "it sounds like in this word" comparisons are always a "good enough" type answer at best lol If I was more confident in my abilities in that area, I might try to dig into that aspect in-game. But since i know better, I'll just stick to saying "you can tell by the way they pronounce it, there's a clear northeastern linguistic influence" and that type of thing.