As children, we all learned that there are five vowels: A, E, I, O, and U. And of, course, sometimes Y. But that leads me to a few questions:
Why isn’t there ANY vowel in the word rhythm? And don’t give me that “Y is acting as a vowel” crap, either. I was taught that only happened at the end of a word. I can see it for the first syllable in rhythm, but why isn’t there a vowel in the second syllable? The -thm certainly sounds like the word them. Why doesn’t this syllable have a vowel?
I remember, for my grade school days (back in the Dark Ages) that the letter W could also be a vowel on at least one occasion. But, for the life of me, I can’t remember what that occasion is. When is W a vowel?
Slightly off-topic: How does slang become used so readily? For example, all of the slang terms for penis. Right off the top of my head, I can think of cock, dick, rod, johnson, prick, sword, Russell the Love Muscle, the Love Gun, the Twig and Berries, etc (apologies if the language is a bit too rough for GQ). How do these slang terms catch on across a nation? Is it strictly through “word of mouth?”
I was taught the same about the vowels. In answer to your question (2), the example that our teachers gave to us was not even English, but Welsh e.g. the hymn title Cwm Rhonnda.
The first vowel in rhythm is the high front lax vowel. Same as the one in the words hit and click for American English speakers. Depending on how you pronounce it, the second syllable of rhythm has the mid central vowel (called a schwa) or the [m] sound is syllabic. Or if you are giving equal stress to both syllables, the vowel in the second syllable would be the other mid central vowel, called a carat. But usually we don’t stress the second syllable in rhythm, and unstressed vowels in American English become the schwa. Or to simplify things, you could say the final [m] sound is part of the coda of the first syllable too. But to me that’s kind of a stretch.
It isn’t spelled with any of the canonical vowel letters (unless you count y), but there’s vowels in there.
WAG: Someone coins a new slang expression, other people find it funny/amusing/useful because it’s not understood by the crusty oldies, so they start using it too which introduces it to a whole new set of people who also find it funny/amusing/useful and from there it just keeps spreading out.
Any slang expression which isn’t instantly funny/amusing/useful and able to be understood by the masses dies a quick death and is forgotten.
In words like clown, town, sewn, etc., the W is a vowel because it combines with the other vowel to make a vowel sound; the actual W consonant sound doesn’t exist in those words.
As regards “rhythm”, I think it is a fair bet (so sorry, no cites as such) that the spelling was set by classical scholars. The word comes from the Latin rhythmus, and ultimately from the Greek, so inserting a vowel in-between the “th” (which of course are a single letter theta in Greek) and the “m” would seem wrong. In the adjectival form “rhythmic” there is no vowel sound there.
The same pattern can be seen in, for example, microcosm (related root adjective -cosmic), which is also derived from Greek.
Uh, S-dude, it’s usually not too helpful to ask a question and then call the anticipated answer “crap.” Fact is that the letter Y functions as an initial consonant in many words (e.g. young), and also as a vowel (e.g. shy). So, sometimes, it is, indeed, acting as a vowel. Much of your question appears to be rooted in the beliefs that 1) everything you are taught in school is correct. You obviously must know that is not so; 2) that grammar and spelling rules are prescriptive. They are not; they are descriptive. This little set of assumptions has caused you some grief. Question them.
Frack! I typed a long explanation, then hit “Refresh” on my browser!!! :smack: Composing this one offline …
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OK, Superdude … let’s break this down.
1) The Roman alphabet represents the phonetic structure of English only inexactly. The rules you learned in grade school were rough and mostly usable – but not really accurate. Therefore, I will refer to International Phonetic Association symbols (indicated by brackets) as needed.
2) The letter “Y”, like most letters, represents more than one sound in English. Among them are:
a) the /y/ in *young * (IPA [j]).
b) the /ee/ at the end of *very * (IPA [ i]).
c) the /short i/ in the first syllable *synthesis * (IPA [ι]).
These three sounds are considered phonetically related, because the tongue is approximately in the same position for each.
3) As the three sounds above are related, it is not inaccurate to phonetically describe the word young as starting with the vowel [ i] (or even [ι]) rather than the consonant [j]. In other words, there are sounds in human language which dance upon the apparent boundary between vowel and consonant. Just keep in mind that said boundary is essentially an illusion when scrutinized closely enough.
4) OK, so why no vowel letter in the second syllable of rhythm? To put it simply: no vowel is required to generate a syllable – therefore no vowel letter is required. Hazel-rah nailed it in giving you the Cliff Notes. Here’s the underlying detail taken from another recent thread:
You actually managed to pay too much attention in elementary school. School teachers are trying to teach enough about language and writing to allow literacy; they don’t get into linguistics to explain how words work to the young’uns. Most of them probably don’t have any real knowledge of linguistics in the first place - so your teacher may have believed that we can set simple rules for how words are pronounced and spelled, and may have believed in nonsense like “never split an infinitive” or “it’s pronounced this way because of how its spelled”, or even the barbaric idiocy “ain’t isn’t a word, so don’t say it in my classroom!”, even when those notions are baseless.
As stated above, there’s certainly vowels in “rhythm” - a “short I” (to use the common term for the sound) spelled with a “y” in the first syllable, and in my dialect at least, a schwa in the second syllable. So we don’t write it. Who cares? It’s still got two vowels in it.
The letters AEIOU and sometimes Y are not vowels. They are letters - marks on paper. These letters generally are used to stand for vowel sounds in writing, but as you’ve no doubt noticed in the past, written English is not necessarily perfect in its representation of pronunciation. A vowel is a sound made with no obstruction in the mouth - its sound is created by a continuous voicing and the resonance created by the shape of the mouth. The “long O”, for instance, for me involves dropping the jaw slightly, moving the tongue back, rounding the lips, and tightening the throat slightly. The letters we call “vowels” are just the particular symbols that most commonly reflect vowel sounds.