I grabbed one of my teacher manuals then put it back because I felt a “procrastinating about the new school year headache” coming on. See what you’ve done? Under these cirmcumstances, no, I don’t think your staying after school would be a good idea. :mad: (I’m not really mad, but none of the other smiley face thingies properly illustrates this furrowed brow of mine. OK, maybe what I’m doing is ::Shooting a Stern Look at So Far So Good:: )
Linguist weighs in.
In English, Y isn’t a vowel, but it’s not a consonant or semivowel either. It’s a letter of the alphabet.
Phonetically speaking, only sounds can be divided between vowels and consonants, and in English there is no close correlation between sounds and letters as there is in just about every alphabetic language on Earth.
So: in “cry”, the Y represents a vowel, because that’s phonetically pronounced /krai/. The Y represents the vowel sound /ai/. In “yogurt”, which is pronounced /'jQg3rt/, the Y represents the semivowel sound /j/.
So Y sometimes represents a vowel and sometimes a semivowel.
As for W, obviously that usually represents a semivowel(“wind” /wInd/), but it can also be a vowel, and you don’t have to look to Welsh: “cow” is pronounced /kau/, so W represents the vowel sound /u/.
And finally, it’s not true that some English words contain no vowels. Even “nth” is pronounced /enT/, so it contains the vowel /e/. Similarly, “syzygy” is pronounced /'sIzIdZi/, so it contains the vowel sounds /I/ and /i/.
(IPA characters reproduced with the SAMPA computer readable phonetic alphabet.)
OK, this might throw some additional information here.
Y is the Greek version of I. In Spanish we learn there are 5 vowels a,e,i,o,u and yet i is called latin-i and y is called greek-i (i latina, i griega) so there seems to be a contradiction or they just lump both i and y under i.
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.
Spanish has kept the original sounds and the two letters are pretty much interchangeble but certain rules have evolved where y is used when next to another vowel and i when next to a consonant.
In any case, Y started out being a vowel and in many cases it remains one. Think of “my” and you can see y cannot be anything else but a vowel.
Why is a crooked letter.
Nice work, Cranky. Obscure. Subtle. Almost helpful even.
To the OP:
I feel the semivowel status of “y” and “w” is an elegant solution.
I would think that Rachelle should be paying up.
Cranky:
You whooooshed me, but it sounds a bit like this:
she invited me back to her house
and I went but she had a friend
who knocked me out and grabbed my boots
and I was on the street again
I would be happy to exchange obscure references.
“Y” is NEVER a consonant. Sound out “you.” Now do it slower. Accentuate each sound you make. You are saying “EE-OO.” A dipthong, which, by definition, is made up of vowel sounds.
“W” is another permanent vowel. “When” is “OO-EH-N.”
I don’t know who made up this preposterous bit of grammatical crap, but they were wrong three hundred years ago and they are wrong now.
If you want to be shocked into rejecting much of your education, read up on the history of English grammatical rules. They were made up by a few (very, very few) uncredentialed crackpots who didn’t like or agree with each other. We here have a chance to re-write the rules. Let us take that chance.
Phonics and Grammar are not the same thing.
dropzone- this is not a “rule” made up by anybody, it is a matter of definition and observation. As Franny said a vowel is any sound made without enough constriction to cause audible friction. What particular letter is chosen to represent that sound is irrelevant. And if the sound is the initial sound in a word it is usually quite easy to determine if it is a vowel or a consonant. Just place the idefinite particle before it- if your natural inclination is to say “an …” it is a vowel, if you say “a…” it is a consonant. Thus, “a yam”, “a young man”, “a yellow dress”, etc. Note, this also reveals that in words like “European”, “eulogy”, etc. the letter E is being used to represent a consonant sound. The only case with any ambiguity is the sound at the beginning of words like “historic” or “hysterical”. Some people preface that with “a” and others with “an”.
Sheesh- that’s “indefinite article”, not “indefinite particle”.
See, people? THIS is why we have to regain our language from the grammarians. And phonicarians.
To the ramparts!
Um, well maybe there is more than one version of the song, but the Ebn Ozn version I have on tape somewhere is more like what I wrote–even though I got it a wee bit wrong.
[rubbing chin ruefully] Damn that was a good song!
I’ve alwyas heard the “sometimes y” rule, but I don’t understand the debate on “w”, let’s remember what this letter is called - the double U. As in UU (two vowels next to each other) In today’s language we consider the W to be a consonant, but let’s admit that it’s name alone implies usage as a vowel. It’s roots as a vowel in other languages may be what’s causing this confusion. I once read an essay on Beowulf, and in one section the possibility of Beowulf as a real person was being discussed and and it was found that someone with the name “Beouuulf” had signed a monastary’s registry. Of course, this takes place were the people spoke Welsch not English.
And while trying to find a link to the above reference, I’ve forgotten what my point was. However, I did not go hunting for links for 40 minutes just to discard this post, so I’m moving forward, point-free now. If you can find my point in this post, feel free to share with me. Please. I’d like to know what I was trying to prove for the last 40 minutes.
I think it had something to do with “w” not being a vowel in the English language unless paired with another vowel, whereas “y” can stand alone as a vowel, which is why “w” is not added to the list (a,e,i,o,u, and sometimes y) in English, and we shouldn’t use other languages as an argument for rules in the English language.
ok, Brat, take a breath. Good boy
Our alphabet is a semi-phonetic alphabet. (If it were a fully phonetic alphabet each letter would have one and one sound only, and each sound would be represented by one and one letter only. But it comes decently close.)
Meanwhile, even with fully phonetic systems such as the IPA, there is the need to acknowledge that certain sounds can function differently depending on context. “p” and “b” are different from each other in most contexts but linguists say there is no meaningful differentiation between “sp” and “sb” in formulations such as the English word “spy”; in other words, even in a fully phonetic system there is no hard and fast rule for determining that it should be rendered as ‘sbai’ or as ‘spai’.
In the case at hand, the letter “y” in English represents more than one phoneme (sound). In “yellow”, “payable”, and “New York”, this sound is represented by the IPA symbol “j” and is a consonant. In “pry”, “cyanotic”, and “psychiatrist”, that sound is considered a diphthong and is represented by a pair of IPA symbols that look like “a” and “I” (where the “a” has the full curved top rather than the simpler “a” consisting of a circle with a vertical line appended to the right side, and the “I” looks like a capital “I” with the top and bottom serif bar), and these two symbols are both vowels, making “y” in this case not merely a vowel but a pair of them. In “Yvette”, “pretty”, and “basically”, the sound is represented by the IPA symbol that looks like “i” (in which the lower case “i” has a left-only facing serif on top and a full serif on the bottom) and is again a vowel. In "Lynn, “dyskinesia”, and “tryst”, and also after o in “boy” or “Soylent Green”, the sound is represented by the IPA symbol “I” by itself, the same symbol that was joined with “a” to form the diphthong “long I” sound “ai”, and as I said before, “I” is a vowel. Then there are places where the “y” does not represent any sound by itself at all in English, but instead indicates a sound only in conjunction with some other letter, such as with “a” in the word “say” (“se” in IPA), so in such cases as this it could not be said to be vowel OR a consonant (you could argue that it is silent and only “flags” the a as making the IPA “e” sound rather than the IPA “a” sound).
OK, I’m leaving, I’m leaving, don’t push!
AAARRGH!!
AHunter3 made my brain hurt.
Thanks **CrankyAsAnOldMan **,
That was bothering me. I am not familiar with Ebn Ozn. My song was 115th Dream by Bob Dylan. And I screwwed up a little too. “Grabbed” should read “Robbed”.
The title is, of course, AEIOU (sometimes Y).
On orthographic representations…
When transcribing Greek, w is used to represent o mega (omega, long o), and o is used to represent o mikron (omicron, short o).
It is entirely possible to sound two vowels in succession without the semi-vowel elision between them (“y” or “w”, as the case may be. We just don’t do it much in English. It is also possible to sound those semi-vowel sounds without much of a vowel on the leading end of them. The “vowel” that you come up with when you slow yourself down stems from the fact that your little speech parts are in similar positions when sounding those vowels and semi-vowels. (This is similar to how the p slipped into Thompson and Simpson.)
As for writing grammatical rules, we aren’t talking grammar. We’re talking phonetics. Grammatical rules aren’t promulgated, they are recorded, although once recorded many people treat them as prescriptive and immutable. They aren’t, or we’d all be speaking Old English, make that proto-Germanic, make that proto-Indo European, make that proto-World.
Phonetic “rules” are even slipperier than grammatical ones, hence the incredible variety of regional dialects throughout the English-speaking world, and indeed among almost any language that’s spoken in more than one community.
Thanks for the informative post, you cunning linguist…