the sound of Hindu holy sound Aum

http://www.spiritsound.com/aum.html

In the Sanskrit tradition, this sound is called "Anahata Nada," the "Unstruck Sound." Literally, this means "the sound that is not made by two things striking together." The point of this particular distinction is that all ordinary audible sounds are made by at least two elements: bow and string...

Joseph Campbell likens this unstruck vibration to the humming of an electrical transformer, or the (to our ears) unheard hummings of atoms and molecules.

And the ancients say that the audible sound which most resembles this unstruck sound is the syllable OM. Tradition has it that this ancient mantra is composed of four elements: the first three are vocal sounds: A, U, and M. The fourth sound, unheard, is the silence which begins and ends the audible sound, the silence which surrounds it.

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http://apathintotheworld.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/joseph-campbell-explanation-of-om/
It is written AUM start in the back of the mouth – A – and then u – you fill the mouth and M closes at the mouth. And you pronounce it properly all vowel sounds are in that pronunciation. Constanants are regarded simply as interruptions of OM, and thus all words are fragments of OM, as all images are fragments of the form of forms. All things are just reflections and so OM is just a symbol. A symbolic sound that puts you in touch with that throbbing being that is the universe.

This is called the 4 element syllable:

A – the birth

U – the coming into being

M – the dissolution

the fourth element is the silence out of which it comes, and back into which it goes, and which underlies it.

Now my life is the A-U-M but there is a silence that underlies it, and that is what we would call the immortal.

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D - hmm, looks like my scheme to teach English diphthongs to Spanish ESL students. I suspect the Spanish diphthongs glide through the territory of English-only vowels.

Spanish has six falling diphthongs and eight rising diphthongs. While many diphthongs are historically the result of a recategorization of vowel sequences (hiatus) as diphthongs, there is still lexical contrast between diphthongs and hiatus.[39] There are also some lexical items that vary amongst speakers and dialects between hiatus and diphthong: words like biólogo ('biologist')... (wiki)

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D - just started watching a series of video lessons on linguistics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter

D - he wrote a number of books on Black English and Creoles.
His lessons are highly accessible. He uses simple, everyday language to explain the subject. I already learned a few things, such as the names of funky IPA phonetic letters.