Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 February 15

= February 15 =

iw, iy & uw
Back when I was a teenager, my family played Boggle. My younger sister used to just used to right down a lot of "words" just to have the chance that they might be in the dictionary. At one point, simply to reduce this, we added a rule that no words with iw, iy or uw could be used. This was for places where they would be dipthongs, something equivalent to Kuwait would have been fine. Are there any words in modern English with any of these as dipthongs? Naraht (talk) 16:07, 15 February 2024 (UTC)


 * What do you mean by "as diphthongs"? $⟨uw⟩$ in Kuwait doesn't represent a diphthong, just a vowel and a semivowel with a syllable break in between. English phonotactics prohibits a semivowel from ending a syllable (unless it's the second component of a phonemic diphthong) and $⟨iw, iy, uw⟩$ aren't normally found without a syllable boundary (even though some accents retain /ɪʊ̯/ distinct from /juː/ and it's sensible to analyze /iː, uː/ in many accents as /ɪj, ʊw/) so it's indeed unlikely. Nardog (talk) 16:45, 15 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Naraht -- There's the Welsh name Huw and any number of names with the Arabic nisbah/"gentilic" adjective suffix whose feminine and plural forms are often transcribed with "-iyy" (Ibn Taymiyyah etc), but there aren't too many acclimatized English words with those sequences. Some forms of Middle English actually had a phonetic [iw] diphthong, but it wasn't usually spelled with the letter "i".  According to an old book I have here, "Historical Outlines of English Phonology and Morphology" by Samuel Moore, the spellings "eu" and "ew" in Chaucer nearly always represented phonetic [iw], and there were only about ten words in which such spellings represented phonetic [ew]... AnonMoos (talk) 00:29, 16 February 2024 (UTC)