# a, e, i, o, u... and sometimes y?  I don't think so

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-e-i-o-u-and-sometimes-y-i-dont-think-so/27194>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [July 28, 2000, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-e-i-o-u-and-sometimes-y-i-dont-think-so/27194 "2000-07-28T13:24:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![Kiki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kiki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiki)\
**Post date:** [July 31, 2000, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-e-i-o-u-and-sometimes-y-i-dont-think-so/27194/61 "2000-07-31T15:26:01Z")

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Just a little F.Y.I. for everyone. I told Matt that everyone here had heard of the a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y rule and he was right and I was wrong! Damn, that was really hard to say too! I accepted my defeat and gladly made good on our bet! 😉

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**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2000, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-e-i-o-u-and-sometimes-y-i-dont-think-so/27194/62 "2000-08-01T00:31:00Z")

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Just to elaborate on what sailor said:

> [@](#):
>
> The sound of i and y is interchangeable, (of course the sound of “I” in English has nothing to do with the original latin sound which would be like the e in me.

In Latin, the letter which looks like our letter ‘i’ (or sometimes ‘j’) is almost identical in value to our letter ‘y’. Typically, the ‘i’ symbol is used when it’s being used for a more vowell-like sound, and the ‘j’ symbol is used when it’s more consonant-like, but the sounds of both versions are actually extremely similar, other than the length of the sound-- Try saying EE-upiter versus Y-upiter, for instance.

By the way, all of you linguists out there trying to describe letters with serifs, if you use an isolated end-bold tag, it turns the following text into a **serif font** \*\*, at least in Netscape.

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