Everyone in Kiwi land says yea. Not like you and I say yea. Not as a hurried substitute for an actual yes. But a real tongue-gliding, prolonged, filler-for-actual-words diphthongy eyyyea...
In phonetics, a diphthong, or , (also gliding vowel) (from Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally "two sounds" or "two tones") is a contour vowel—that is, a unitary vowel that changes quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a smooth movement of the tongue from one articulation to ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong
Definitions such as these are why I flunked out of Linguistics but eyyyea...
2 comments:
English Teacher :P
I'm Greek and you just taught me a Greek word- thanks! Now I can shock my Greek-Greek friends (as opposed to Greek-X; in my case, Australian) by using complicated Hellenic words... albeit with a slight accent.
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