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English orthography typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters a, e, i, o, u , as well as y , which may also be a consonant depending on context. However, outside of abbreviations, there are a handful of words in English that do not have vowels, either because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters ...
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively. The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth").
The letters used for non-existent phonemes were dropped. [35] Afterwards, however, the alphabet went through many different changes. The final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters. Four of them are vowels— a, e, i, u —six fewer letters than the earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century CE.
Largely unaltered excepting several letters splitting—i.e. J from I , and U from V —additions such as W , and extensions such as letters with diacritics, it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Europe, Africa, America and Oceania.
The disuse of this letter is at least partly due to the publication of William Salesbury's Welsh New Testament and William Morgan's Welsh Bible, whose English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough k letters in their type cases to spell every /k/ as k , so the order went "C for K, because the ...
Some letters may be referred to in alternative ways, often consisting of just the sound of the letter. For example, y may be called as it is pronounced: y rather than igrek (from 'Greek i'). When giving the spelling of words, certain letters may be said in more emphatic ways to distinguish them from other identically pronounced characters.
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The oldest direct ancestor of the letter Y was the Semitic letter waw (pronounced as [w]), from which also come F, U, V, and W. See F for details. The Greek and Latin alphabets developed from the Phoenician form of this early alphabet. The form of the modern letter Y is derived from the Greek letter upsilon. It dates back to the Latin of the ...