Vowels

[Clark-TX]

When I was in grammer school (1950-1956) I was taught that the English vowels were a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y,w. Currently children are taught the vowels are a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y. What happened to w as a vowel? What is an example of a word were w is a vowels?

[Sultan_Kinkari]

Here are two words:

Cwm (a steep-walled semicircular basin in a mountain, sometimes containing a lake; a cirque) and crwth (an ancient Celtic musical instrument), both from the Welsh, use w as a vowel–standing for the same sound that “oo” stands for in boom and booth. Crwth is also spelled “crowd.”

[Lsura]

Are there any words that use “w” as a vowel?

[hajario]

*Originally posted by Clark-TX *
**When I was in grammer school (1950-1956) I was taught that the English vowels were a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y,w. Currently children are taught the vowels are a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y. What happened to w as a vowel? What is an example of a word were w is a vowels? **

I only know of one word in English where w might be considered a vowel, cwm. It’s from Welsh where w probably is a vowel. It means “a steep walled basin on a mountain.” Pronounced like *koom.

Haj

[Lsura]

I see wishbone used google as well.

I’d have had it first if it weren’t for that 60-second rule.

[El_Zagna]

This has also been discussed here, but now that they have limited the search engine, I couldn’t find it.

What’s odd about this is that so many teachers have taught this for so many years without being able to give a single example of a word with “w” as the vowel.

[bibliophage]

A guy named Cecil Adams answered this one. Is it true “W” can be used as a vowel?

Try “how,” which is phonetically equivalent to “hou,” as in house. Ou and ow are diphthongs–that is, two vowel sounds that kind of slide together when you say them. W and Y are often called semivowels because they go both ways, as it were, depending on the company they keep within the word.

. . .

Cwm, pronounced “koom” and signifying “mountain hollow,” is a borrowing from Welsh, in which tongue W is a vowel equivalent to oo (or perhaps we should say, double-U). Use of W this way in English is anomalous and is not what linguists have in mind when they talk about W being a part-time vowel.

[Johanna]

The glides /y/ and /w/ are often called “semivowels.”

It is just as accurate to call them “semiconsonants.”

[Chronos]

One can also argue that w is always a vowel. Try saying “water” very slowly: It comes out something like “ooo-ah-ter”.

[dtilque]

*Originally posted by Jomo Mojo *
The glides /y/ and /w/ are often called “semivowels.”

Nitpick. You mean /j/ and not /y/. (I made this same mistake not too long ago and got corrected, too.) It’s the fault of the German philologists involved in the definition of IPA. If they’d left it to English speakers, we wouldn’t have these problems…

[Johanna]

Whoops, yeah, I meant /j/. Thanks for catching that. I’ve been using IPA most of my life but still I always forget that one!

[december]

*Originally posted by Lsura *
I see wishbone used google as well.

Or, as the Welsh call it, gwgle*

[Steve_Wright]

As a (rusty) linguistician, and someone who spent the first five years of his life living in a place called Cwmdare, let me stick my £0.02 worth on this subject.

The letter W, in English, is used to represent a labial approximant consonant. Labial means it’s produced with the lips, approximant means they’re not close enough together to produce turbulence (if they were, you’d get a fricative instead).

In Welsh, the same letter is used to indicate a high back rounded vowel; one that’s produced with the lips rounded, with the back of the tongue raised towards the soft palate. (This site has a standard vowel diagram, and two “next page” clicks away is a discussion of how this maps onto English vowel sounds.)

Cwm and crwth are both borrowed from the Welsh. However, once English borrows words, it doesn’t often give them back, so they’re English words… however, there is no pronunciation of those words that’s acceptable within English rules for stringing consonants together (the classy name is phonotactics), so the Welsh rules for pronunciation apply.

You could argue, from the descriptions given above, that there’s not an awful lot of difference between a voiced labial approximant and a high back rounded vowel. And you’d be pretty much right; there is a sort of no-man’s land where approximant consonants are concerned. The rule of thumb, when I was studying linguistics at any rate, is whether or not the speech sound in question is the only vowel sound in the syllable you find it in. (Terms like “contoid” and “vocoid” get bandied about in this context, but I’m not going to go into them…) So, in cwm, the thing in the middle is a vowel, because the things around it definitely aren’t; in the similar quick, you probably wouldn’t class the “w” sound (in the q) as a vowel, as it’s followed by a vowel sound, and the “w” is quite fast and (probably) not voiced. Even though your mouth is probably in much the same shape for the “w” of “quick” as it is for the “w” of “cwm”.

I hope that’s clear. Basically, as anyone who’s done this sort of stuff knows only too well, English spelling is only a first attempt at getting anything that actually represents the speech sounds being used.

[Arnold_Winkelried]

By the way, I’ll add to the two pangrams mentioned in Cecil’s column this one, that was in the Guinness Book of World Records:
“Cwm kvutza qoph jynx fled brigs”.

[Ethilrist]

So we’re going to have to revise the answers to the question, What words have all the vowels in order?

Now, you just have to say them with an Elmer Fudd accent:

abstemiouswy
abstentiouswy

etc.