What exactly is the distinction between a vowel and consonant? Y is classified as only sometimes being a vowel, but it sounds to me like it’s always a vowel. It feels like a “tight” (can’t think of a better word) eee. Also, W. It feels like a “tight” ooo.
In Cecil’s column on ventriloquism or something of the like, he went through how to make various “hard” sounds, “y” being one of them. making a long “ooo” sound followed by “i” (as in “eye”) makes practically the same sound. It looks like it’s pretty arbitrary 
The difference between a vowel and a consonant is that when you ‘say’ a vowel the airflow thru your throat and mouth is unobstructed. For consonants you obstruct the flow of air to make the sound. Notice that you can hold a vowel sound for a while, say aaaaaaaa for the doctor, but you can’t do that for consonants.
The thing about y being a vowel sometimes and a consonant other times is based on the fact that English has more sounds than there are letters in the alphabet, so y does double duty.
Ssssssssssssssssssssss …
Arjuna34
You can’t hold consonant sounds? Mmmm, dunno if I agree with you there.
W and Y are classified (in English) as “semivowels” (or “semiconsonants”, whichever you prefer). Tzel is absolutely correct in thinking they’re basically just very short versions of the /i/ and /u/ sounds and whether they serve a vowel or consonant function in a word depends on the letters that surround them. H is also sometimes classified as a semiv/c, though for different reasons.
The air obstruction thing Indiana mentioned is also basically correct, though there’s a class of consonants called “sonorants” where the air isn’t really obstructed, at least not in the way most it is with most consonants (which are classed as “obstruent”). The sonorant category includes the glides (W and Y, when they’re serving consonant functions), the liquid consonants (L and R) and the nasal consonants, N and M (the phoneme written in English as “ng” is also usually included in this category, though it isn’t a consonant as such in the English alphabet).
So in other words, consonants are consonants because air is obstructed when you speak them, except for the ones where it isn’t. Unfortunately the explanation doesn’t really get much better than that.
My New Years resolution: always preview …
W was a “semivowel” in my school reader.
They said it shows up in Whale as h’wale.
I never believed that, though.
I’ve noticed some people use an H sound for “Wh-” words. A texan in particular. “Hwhat did you say?”
The reason for this is that the “hw” sound is the alternate original pronounciation. In Old English and Middle English, they were spelled with h before w:
hwa - what
hwær - where
hwil - while
These spellings make more sense phonetically:
hwat - what
hwere - where
hwile - while
Oops.
When I was thinking of not holding consanants ‘b’ was the one in my mind. It’s been a while since that linguistics course.