PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects

In English, monophthongs, diphthongs and in British English also triphthongs function as centres in syllables, while Slovak has only monophthongs and diphthongs in its phonemic inventory. English short vowels are more lax than Slovak pure vowels, and the quality of the English long vowels is quite similar to Slovak vowels. English short schwa ə functions only in unstressed syllables, while long schwa ɜ: is always placed in stressed syllables. Sounds similar to the short and long schwa are used in communication in Slovak as pause-fillers or hesitators, but these two sounds do not have distinctive function, so they are not phonemes (Bázlik, Miškovičová, 2012).

The basic difference between English and Slovak diphthongs is in the placement of a higher degree of prominence on individual segments. While English diphthongs are mostly pronounced as falling (with stress on the initial segment), Slovak diphthongs have stress placement on the second segment, so they are rising.

The initial segments in British closing diphthongs /aɪ aʊ ͻɪ/ and in American /oʊ/ do not correspond to any of the monophthong phonemes, as they are of different quality and are only pronounced in diphthongs. Very interesting and worth mentioning is the American /ju/ diphthong presented only by some sources. The consonant /j/ is one of the approximant consonants which are “phonetically like vowels, but phonologically like consonants. From the phonetic point of view, the articulation of j is practically the same as that of a front close vowel such as i:, but is very short “ (Roach, 1996, p. 61). Jones also says that “/w/ and /j/ are very similar to close vowels such as /u/ and /i/, but are produced as a rapid glide” (Jones, 2003, p. 30). It would be very interesting to thoroughly analyse and compare the acoustic qualities of the /j/-sound in American /ju/ with the Slovak /ĭ/-sound manifested only in diphthongs, especially in /ĭu/ with which it obviously corresponds.

Some linguistic sources state that the quality of initial vowel segments in the Slovak diphthongs ia, /ĭa/, ie /ĭe/, iu /ĭu/ and ô /ŭo/ is the same as the quality of monophthongs (e.g. Bázlik, Miškovičová, 2012), but other scholars support the theory that the first segment in the Slovak diphthongs is less sonorant and shorter than pure vowels /i/ and /u/ and that neither from the acoustic nor from the articulatory point of view are they identical with short monophthongs /i/ and /u/. They have only some features in common (Kráľ, Sabol, 1989). In the vowel cluster (hiatus) /i/ + /u/, /i/ is a monophthong occurring for instance in the Slovak word vyupratovať /vi-upratovať/ while /ĭ/ functions as the initial segment of the diphthong – for example in the word paniu /paňĭu/. The syllable morphemic boundaries are crucial for deciding for either /i/ or /ĭ/.