Episode 27: face

Phil and Eric face the music on this one: they tackle the ticklishly intriguing face lexical set, and discuss diphthongs, monophthongs and other phthings, er, things related to the set! And Eric manages to avoid making his lame joke about dip-thongs (something about small European bathing suits...)

In the course of things, they discuss the chart on wikipedia that lays out the sound changes of the Great Vowel Change. Follow along with the chart while listening!

They also discuss the breve (which wikipedia says is pronounced [bɹiv] though we say [bɹɛv] through the whole episode) and the nonsyllabic diacritics, which look like this respectively (though I can’t seem to get them to line up with the small cap i symbol...):

eɪ̆ and eɪ̯