Diphthong versus Digraph

I've been getting requests for "diphthong" and "digraph" from various homeschooling moms. At my eight-year-old's birthday party, one mom asked about one of these and I looked it up. May you never say that you leave the Gingerbread House without learning something. Here's what I found:

A diphthong is especially exciting to me because there exists both a rising diphthong and a falling diphthong.

Perhaps we should do an all rising diphthong Peni$ Game at Canoga Park Bowl one day. Or maybe a falling diphthong game, depending. For now, however, we can take comfort that a rising diphthong is "a diphthong in which the second element is more sonorous than the first (as \\wi\\ in \\ˈkwit\\ quit)." A falling diphthong is vastly different: It is a diphthong (as \\ȯi\\ in \\ˈnȯiz\\ noise) composed of a vowel followed by a less sonorous glide. I'm tellin' ya, we'd have to put on those thinking caps on a rising or falling diphthong Peni$ Game night at Canoga Park Bowl. A diphthong itself is a "gliding monosyllabic speech sound (as the vowel combination at the end of toy) that starts at or near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves to or toward the position of another." Its meaning is akin to a digraph, but a most interesting thing is the letter of Old English, which I don't know how to reproduce on this blog (you can see it in the link to the definition), is also called a diphthong. I don't remember knowing that.

Here's the exciting digraph news, as with its etymological cousin, it is a fabulous candidate for the Peni$ Game at Dante's Divine Comedy show, each Monday and Tuesday night. For now, we'll have to settle for the regular old dictionary definition, which is a "group of two successive letters whose phonetic value is a single sound (as ea in bread or ng in sing) or whose value is not the sum of a value borne by each in other occurrences (as ch in chin where the value is \\t\\ + \\sh\\)." Heavy, I know; I have to absorb it as well. Digraph also means, literally, "two letters."

Therefore, a consonant blend is a digraph, but a digraph may or may not be a consonant blend.