SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:What about
puhua and
(hän) puhuu? Because you said that two short vowels could also look like a diphtong, I am wondering if puhuu really is pronounced with a long vowel, as I used to think. Yes, this is a beginner's question
. But I am a beginner anyway. So is it pronounced puhuu or puhu-u?
Beginner questions as just as welcome as any other type of questions!
No, you haven't been mistaken - it is pronounced ['puɦu:].
I should've written "two
different short vowels" - in any case, long vowels, two short vowels in adjacent syllables, and diphthongs are all different things. The difference between a short and a long vowel is the length, nothing else*; diphthong has two different vowels in the same syllable; and
hiatus (which, I've now learnt, is the term in English I was looking for) means that there's two different vowels one after another but they belong to different syllables. For example, you have a long vowel in
pu.huu, diphthong in
pu.hui.vat, and hiatus in
pu.hu.a.
But whether some vowels belong to the same syllable or not hardly matters in speech. They sound pretty much the same, although sometimes you can hear a difference in stress. Anyway, you need to know the syllables if you want to add hyphenation to your text or if - like in my previous post - you're talking about linguistics.
*There could be some difference in height, too, but I'm not sure if anyone has ever studied that. I did a quick search and found a doctoral thesis that has something about length, but it's half past ten right now and tbh I feel a bit tired, so I'll just leave a link here with a warning that it might or might not be relevant: *
click*.