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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 ...
There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one phonetic and the other phonological.. In the phonetic definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English "ah" / ɑː / or "oh" / oʊ /, produced with an open vocal tract; it is median (the air escapes along the middle of the tongue), oral (at least some of the airflow must escape through the mouth), frictionless and continuant. [4]
The letter y has double function (modifying the vowel as well as being pronounced as [j] or [i]) in the words payer, balayer, moyen, essuyer, pays, etc., but in some words it has only a single function: [j] in bayer, mayonnaise, coyote; modifying the vowel at the end of proper names like Chardonnay and Fourcroy.
Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u have in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
The longest word without any of the main five vowels but including Y: Twyndyllyng Main article: English words without vowels The longest words recorded in OED with each vowel only once, and in order, are abstemiously , affectiously , and tragediously (OED).
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
The word disemvowel is a pun and portmanteau combining vowel and disembowel. [1] One of the earliest attestations of the word dates back to the 1860s. [2] The 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce also uses it: "Secret speech Hazelton and obviously disemvowelled". [3]
I have difficulty with the idea that W and Y are consonants in Spanish. Y is in fact a vowel: in words like "y" it is very obviously a vowel. In words like "ya" it is an i-glide forming a diphthong with the following vowel, ie it is a short a short vowel, nothing like a consonant (exactly like the i vowel in the word "gracia" in fact).