Letters that are either vowel or consonant

Factual Questions
1

In another forum, we’re having an argument about which letters are vowels. The British/Australians think there are only 5: AEIOU, while the Americans/Canadians include “sometimes Y”. I’m not really interested in continuing that argument here, although a search of the archives finds both a thread and Cecil column about whether W is also a vowel (there doesn’t seem to be any doubt here about whether Y is sometimes a vowel):

Thread: So what letters are vowels, again?

Column: Is it true “W” can be used as a vowel?

My question has to do with other languages. Do any others have letters which represent either a consonant or a letter depending on use?

I know Latin has two such: I and V, although nowadays, they are usually written as I and U for the vowels and J and V for the consonants. That’s not the way they were written a couple thousand years ago, though.

Any other examples from other languages?

2

y can act as a vowel here in Oz too.

3

Hebrew has vav which has a “V” sound in some usages, but long “o” (as in tote) or “oo” (as in food) in other usages.

And yod which is substantially equivalent to the English “Y”, both as a consonant and as a vowel. When used as a vowel, it typically combines with another vowel to form a diphthong – that is, a different vowel that is otherwise not represented in the written language.

4

Spanish can have y represent the vowel i (most frequently in the word y, meaning and), or be a consonant (pretty much in any other word that’s not borrowed from English: for example, apoyar, which means to support). Ll used to represent a different sound, but nowadays ll and consonant-y are in the process of becoming a single phoneme (I’m one of many people whose pronunciations of poyo and pollo are identical - and I can’t hear them apart either unless the other person overpronounces).

5

Fight my ignorance here. I was under the impression the Hebrew alphabet had no vowels but clearly there must be vowel sounds. How does that work?

6

The Hebrew alphabet has vowels (aleph, for starters*), but they’re often ellided in writing.

  • Sorry, I couldn’t help myself!
7

And in Britain.

Come to that, the Welsh (who are British) certainly use W as a vowel: Cwm Rhondda.

8

U and the eu dipthong can sort of act as a consonant in English - q.v. Europe, urine, utensil - as there’s an implied Y at the start.

9

In Dutch the letter y can also be both a vowel and a consonant. It isn’t used much outside loanwords and old-fashioned names. It’s a confusing letter for the Dutch, confused with the digraph “ij” which itself is easily confused with the digraph “ei”. Spent a summer working in an archive once trying sort out the mess they had made with the alphabet. Nincompoops, they don’t know their own language.

Portuguese keeps it simple: they just don’t have the letters y or w. Or k. None of that nonsense.

10

Not so much “vowels” as “placeholders.” Hebrew denotes vowels by using additional non-alphabetical diacritics, which are generally never used any more except in childrens’ literature, poetry, and the odd case where a pronunciation needs to be explicitly given.
While in many cases these diacritics don’t require them, the letters Aleph, Vav, Heh and Yod* act as sometimes-placeholders for “long” vowel sounds, or as pronunciation mnemonics (in which case they are in fact acting as “true” vowels.) All but Aleph** have a consonant sound as well (Vav = V, Heh = H, Yod = Y), in other cases.
It’s all complicated by the fact that Hebrew spelling is currently a bit like Shakespearean English spelling – i.e., you can get away with practically any use of “vowel letters” as long as it looks about the same as it’s pronounced (and sometimes when it looks downright different, to me…)

  • And in Modern Hebrew, also effectively Ayin, although it should always have a (slight, guttural) sound of its own
    ** And supposedly, in antiquity the Aleph had its own, also guttural, sound, too.
11

The ancient Semitic alphabets (Phoenician, Hebrew) had no vowels. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to anybody that when you decide to write down your oral traditions, you should spell out the vowel sounds along with the consonants. Go figure. When you read the written words, you kinda just had to know what vowels to fill in.

After the fall of Judea and the beginning of the Diaspora, Hebrew became a mostly-dead language. In fact, it was mostly dead long before that, having been replaced mostly by Aramaic (which looks like Hebrew because it uses the same alphabet). Jesus spoke Aramaic. Hebrew was kept alive only by Jewish scholars and rabbis, for liturgical use – much like Latin was kept alive only for use in the Catholic Church.

But as widespread Hebrew literacy declined, people began to forget the pronunciations – in particular, since the Bible and other Hebrew written works had no vowels! Oops.

Around the 7th to 10th centuries (Wiki) a monastic Hebrew outfit called the Masoretes solved this by adding the vowels pretty much as they are known today. But there was a problem!

The Hebrew Scriptures were SACRED texts! It was blasphemy to alter so much as a single letter. Not a jot nor a tittle may be changed! So how to upgrade the alphabet with vowels? Well, they left the letters unchanged, but added patterns of dots and dashes under, over, or inside the letters to indicate the vowels. Thus, the vowel points are not strictly part of the alphabet, and they don’t change the spellings of the words. (Some spellings have changed in modern written Hebrew, but I assume that Bible texts must retain their classic spellings.)

Modern written Hebrew generally doesn’t use the vowel points. So you still just have to know how words are pronounced. The vowel marks are generally used for children’s books or for adult Hebrew As A Second Language students (that is, anyone just learning the language), or for proper names or foreign words that would need their pronunciation explicitly specified.

The letters aleph is commonly associated with the Greek alpha, or Latin or English A. But in Hebrew, it’s a consonant. It’s invariably silent in modern Hebrew, but is combined with a vowel sound just like any other consonant would be, so then it has that vowel sound only.

There are lots of orthography (spelling) rules in Hebrew, and they pretty much treat ALL the letters the same – that is, as consonants – even though vav can have several “o” sounds and yod can have pronunciations like English Y as a consonant or vowel. But they’re still all thought of as consonants.

12

At no time was Latin kept alive only as liturgical language for Catholics. It was the universal language of scholarship in Western Europe, past the Reformation and through to the 17th century. In the 17th century Isaac Newton (a radical Protestant, incidentally) still found it natural to write his Principia in Latin. There may have been a time, in the Middle Ages, when just about everybody in Western Europe who was literate in Latin (which pretty much equals everyone in Western Europe who was literate at all) was, in fact, a Catholic Church official of some kind, but it does not follow that Latin was kept alive only for religious (much less only for liturgical) purposes. (If anything, the reverse: the Catholic Church survived through the pagan, barbarian invasions that destroyed the Roman Empire, and was able to convert the barbarian leaders to Christianity, largely because it was the monopoly supplier of literate people, competent to man the bureaucracies that ambitious barbarian kings needed to administer their growing kingdoms.)

It may be true (I don’t really know) that Hebrew survived for a long time almost exclusively as a liturgical language, but, if so, its story is very different from that of Latin.

13

Hey, I knew that! I wasn’t quite paying attention to what I was writing there. :smack: Thanks for the correction.

Is it more correct to say that Latin is largely kept alive mainly as the Catholic liturgical language in modern times? If so, that’s more like what I meant to say.

Hebrew, of course, was a substantially dead language since before the Diaspora, up until its modern resurrection by the early Zionist movement in the late 19th century.

14

Sometimes R, sometimes L or M or N, depending on the language. The Sanskṛt vowels ऋ ṛ and ऌ ḷ were originally pronounced with syllabic r and l, which can form a syllable nucleus exactly as vowels do. Nowadays their pronunciation is taught as ri and li in North India, ru and lu in South India. They’ve been converted to consonant+vowel syllables. Which is why Sanskṛt is now called Sanskrit.

15

In fact, there are a small handful of English words that have a non-vowel syllable nucleus. The favorite word of my linguistics teacher to illustrate a real, common word that followed the sonority contour principle yet had no actual vowel sound was

[skwɹl] – squirrel

16

Re Hebrew: AFAIK, the aleph and ayin are stops, glottal and, originally, pharyngeal, although nowadays the ayin is usually not distinguished from each other. (I met one Israeli who had grown up in an Arab speaking town and did pronounce them differently.) But Greek had no need for these stops and turned them into vowels (A and O, resp.). As noted they also turned the semi-vowels yod and vav into vowels (I and U, resp.). They turned the two H sounds into E and eta, although Latin adapted the alphabet at a time when the H was still an H of some sort. The history of the development of our alphabet is fascinating.

Incidentally, the Volvo car company took advantage of the ambiguity of the vav to spell their name (in transliteration) VVLVV.

17

Some do, most of those only pronounce the Ayin and leave Aleph silent; and most (a growing majority) don’t pronounce either.

Well, there was no choice for the initial VV (since Hebrew does not allow an initial Bh [also pronounced “v”]); and I have occasionally seen Volvo spelled as VVLBhV (וולבו), although this is rare.

18

In many Slavic languages, R and L can stand for a vowel. “vlk” (wolf) is a good example from Slovak.

19

And the famous tongue twister from that area: strč prst skrz krk.

20

Depends on your accent- it has a definite ‘i’ in England.