Not Down here ... And tbh when I saw the discussion of Y sometimes being a vowel it was total news to me... Did some reading on the why Y is sometimes considered .. but down here it's more time based ... There's five and that's it
From what I read, whether a letter is a vowel or a constanent depends on whether the mouth closes .. that was news to me ... As said earlier, in Oz we have five vowels and Y isn't in the mix ... Unless someone corrects me on English based English ... Rather than American patois lol ... Sorry, couldn't resist a dig ...
From what I read, whether a letter is a vowel or a constanent depends on whether the mouth closes .. that was news to me ... As said earlier, in Oz we have five vowels and Y isn't in the mix ... Unless someone corrects me on English based English ... Rather than American patois lol ... Sorry, couldn't resist a dig ...
The main issue is thinking of vowels as letters vs. sounds. From a linguistic point of view, a vowel is a sound, not a letter. Y is a letter that sometimes reprsents a consonantal sound, as in the word "yarn" and sometimes represents a vowel sound, as in the word "shiny".
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at November 11, 2016 3:59 AM MST
I think you've highlighted the difficulties of the rules .. I'm open to suggestions certainly, but hard and fast rules would appear to be the way to go?
The Wiki article on the history of the evolution of "W" shows that it goes back to a Latin "V" which came through into early Medieval German as a double "v" -- but because the pronunciation was sliding from a "v" towards a "u" sound, the letter began to be called a double-U.
In English, the letter works as a consonant when it divides words into syllables, e.g., weatherworn, unwell, ragwort, interweave, clockwise, leftwing, handiwork, milliwatts. It also works as part of three vowels: aw, ew, ow.
The sound /w/, which the letter W represents in English, is ultimately a semivowel (a form of consonant which shares some features of vowels) which explains its role in the spelling of some diphthongs.
It depends on the language. W is a vowel in Welsh. For example "cwm" is a Welsh word pronounced "coom" and meaning a sloping valley on the side of a mountain. Some languages have only two vowels. Russian has ten. In general there are thirty to forty recognized vowels, but that refers to subtle things like the different ways of pronouncing "A". The way a Mexican says "peso" is distinctly different from the way an American says it. Things you might not know about vowels: http://mentalfloss.com/article/88290/8-things-you-might-not-know-about-vowels
WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH 