Phonetics: Diphthongs, Syllabic Consonants, and Suprasegmen.

• Vowels composed of one sound are called monophthongs.
• Diphthongs consist of two vowel sounds that blend together to form a single syllable.
•  A syllable consists of a nucleus or peak that can carry such information as stress, loudness, and pitch, and the elements associated with that nucleus.
• In English, liquid and nasal sounds can sometimes act as a syllable or the nucleus of a syllable, and when they do, they are called syllabic consonants.
• An organization founded in France in 1886, with a membership mostly of language teachers, devised an alphabet that would eliminate the ambiguities and inconsistencies of spelling. The organization was called the Phonetic Teachers’ Association, when its name was changed to the current name, the International Phonetic Association (IPA) in 1897.
• In 1888, the association published the first version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is also abbreviated as IPA.
• The main principle of the IPA system is very simple: one symbol represents only one sound and each individual sound is represented by only one symbol.
• Diacritic marks are symbols added to conventional graphic signs, and supply additional information.
• Fundamental frequency is the rate at which the vocal folds (cords) vibrate.
• A phonetic segment or phone is a speech sound that is perceived as an individual and unique sound, different from other such sounds.
• Suprasegmentals or prosodic

  features are characteristics of speech that can distinguish words, phrases, or sentences that are otherwise identical in their phonetic segments.
• Pitch is the perception of fundamental frequency evaluated on a scale from high to low.
• An intonation contour is the overall pitch of an utterance, sometimes represented by a line drawn over the utterance that traces the change in pitch.
• In an intonation language, different intonation contours change the syntactic function of sentences that are otherwise the same.
• In a tonal language, pitch difference in the same string of phones will change the meaning of that string. Examples of this include Mandarin and other Chinese languages, Thai, Zulu, and Navajo.
• The duration of a phone is how long it lasts.
• A geminate is a phone with duration about twice that of the same phone pronounced with a short duration: a long consonant or vowel.
• A singleton is an individual phone with a duration about half as long as a geminate.
• Stress means to make emphatic or more prominent.
• Juncture is a real or perceived pause within a series of phones.