W is a vowel

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Anonymous

#487258 Tue, 11 Mar 08 06:01 AM

Two English words in which w is unquestionably a vowel:

"cwm"

"crwth"

Both of these are found in my copy of Websters.

It was once reported to me that the words "twp" and "bwlch" could be found in some English dictionaries (as English words borrowed from Welsh). I have never seen those in print myself, but twp and bwlch (and awdl) appear on some websites as English words in which w is a vowel.

Anonymous

Vowels

Anonymous

#493304 Wed, 26 Mar 08 07:51 PM

It's a semi vowel (glide) because some times it acts as a vowel and some times as a consonant as in the follwoing :

w & y ( as sounds not letters ) are glides and sometimes they are called semi-vowels because they are like vowels (there is little obstruction) and like consonants ( because of their short duration. The usually carry the following two features :

- consonantal

+ vocalic

It meams that they are partially consonants {+ consonantal , - vocalik} and partially vowels { - consonantal +vocalic}.

Anonymous

Vowels, Consonants

Anonymous

#494700 Sun, 30 Mar 08 09:35 PM

what about the word sky? Hmm

Anonymous

#495060 Mon, 31 Mar 08 09:22 PM

You have a point, but.... W can be seen as pronounced exactly like an oo sound, but it is usually pronounced that way only by non-native speakers trying to wean their way into the English w sound. Enrico Caruso, for example, an Italian who sang in English, used to "transcribe" English into Italian sounds. "O say can you see" became "o-u se-i can i-u si." (Notice the y in you written as i. Italian has no native y or w.) An native English w, as I see it, is a tightening of the extremely forward extended lips before an actual vowel. An Italian speaker has no real phoneme for w, and thus just doesn't hear it (or, for that matter, speak it). What is heard is the Italian vowel u. An English speaker does have the w phoneme and, you might say, actually "hears" the tightening of the protruding lips. In any case, the Italian u (Eng. oo) is nowhere as tensely constricted as the English w (e.g., in went or wine).

What do you think?

Anonymous

Vowels

Forbes

#495812 Wed, 02 Apr 08 02:45 PM

This starts to get involved!

I think it comes down, at least in part, to whether a native speaker's perception of what sounds exist in his language is influenced by how the language is written. In Italian, the sound /w/ hardly ever occurs at the beginning of a word and therefore no need is felt for the sound to have its own letter. It is represented by the letter <u>. Since it is represented by that letter which usually represents a "full" vowel", whenever it is used it is perceived to represent a full vowel. An English speaker, on the other hand will hear words such as "uomo" as /womo/.

I am not a phonetician, but I suspect that if a phonetic analysis is made of the initial sounds of Italian "uomo" and English "woke", that any difference will be found to be quantitative rather than qualitative.

Forbes

Joined on Thu, Jun 16 2005

Regular Member (827)

Vowels, Phonetics

shaved

#507805 Wed, 30 Apr 08 07:22 PM

The way I see it, <w> is never used as a vowel in modern English.

It's clear to me that one cannot produce the <w> sound without affixing a vowel sound to it in order to produce the sound correctly. This is the very definition of the word 'consonant'.

Any linguist worth their salt will agree that inclusion of borrowed Welsh words in this discussion is doing nothing but muddying the waters. The convention of using the <w> as the sole vowel sound in a syllable may be a convention in Welsh, but that convention was not borrowed, and the words themselves did not make it into popular English usage in any context.

Under no circumstances can <w> be used as an actual vowel (without the 'help' of another vowel) in English. So, it's not a 'semivowel' or a 'sometimes vowel'.... it is a full-time consonant.

<y> is an entirely different scenario because it is acutally used as a vowel by itself in many contexts. For this reason, <y> is a 'semivowel' or whatever term you want to use.

shaved

Joined on Fri, Apr 11 2008

Junior Member (63)

Vowels, Consonants

Forbes

#508187 Thu, 01 May 08 05:09 PM

There are two currents of confusion running through this thread.

The first is that some are confusing symbols with sounds. If you ask an English schoolboy how many vowels there are in English he will say that there are five, and may add that "y" is sometimes a vowel. But there are of course far more than five and a half vowels in English. What we have is six symbols to represent them all, with consonant symbols sometimes providing a clue.

The second arises from the difficulty of deciding what a consonant is. If we start with a provisional definition that a vowel is a sound that is made without any obstruction of the vocal tract and that a consonant is a sound which involves obstruction of the vocal tract, then we have no problem in deciding that /a/ and /o/ are vowels and that /s/ and /t/ are consonants. When we get to sounds like /l/ it becomes a bit trickier. The vocal tract is narrowed, but there is little or no audible friction. The sounds /w/ and /j/ are trickier still as they closely resemble vowels - hence the name semi-vowel. They have their vowel counterparts /u/ and /i/. The fact that the sounds /w/ and /j/ have symbols in the IPA, but that Latin (and other languages) do not have separate symbols for them says a lot about them. It can be difficult to decide if you have a /w/ or an /u/ as well as if you have a /i/ or an /j/

Deciding what you have depends on whether you are making a phonetic analysis, which looks at how the sound is articulated, or a phonological analysis, which looks at how the sound functions. The problem is that your analysis may be influenced by the written form of the language where a decision may have effectively already have been made as to whether the sounds /w/ and /j/ exist in the language. However, as a rule of thumb, you can say that when the sounds /u/ and /i/ form a syllable with another vowel, they are usually written as /w/ and /j/.

Forbes

Vowels, Phonetics, Consonants

shaved

#508203 Thu, 01 May 08 05:55 PM

Forbes...

the distinction you're drawing is very nice, but I think the actual question is not phonetic OR phonological in nature. It appears that the OP is asking about the letter itself, not the sounds it represents (in context or out of context).

The OP wants to know why the letter <w> is not considered a vowel even though it appears to him or her that pronouncing the letter in some cases creates a vowel-like sound in addition to the 'normal' <w> sound.

The point I'm making is that the letter <w> never stands alone as a vowel in English. And while it's true that part of the spectrum of sounds represented by that letter contains some 'vowel-like' sounds, that is not enough to remove the letter from the consonant category.

For the English letter <w> to become more than just a consonant, it must be capable of functioning as a vowel on its own.

Until that time, the letter <w> is a consonant in English, and anyone trying to make a case for its semivowel status is just equivocating.

shaved

Vowels, Phonetics, Consonants, English letters

Forbes

#512194 Sat, 10 May 08 10:06 PM

A distinction has to be made between (a) a sound that functions as a consonant but has a vowel-like quality and (b) a symbol that sometimes represents a vowel sound and sometimes a sound that functions as a consonant but has a vowel-like quality. Confusingly, both (a) and (b) may be described as "semi-vowels".

In the word "sky" <y> represents a vowel (or more accurately a dipthong) whilst in "you" it represents a sound that functions as a consonant but has a vowel-like quality.

If we accept that, and consider the words "how" and "thou" we have to accept that the <w> and <u> have exactly the same function. No one will agree that in "thou" <u> operates to represent a consonant and accordingly it must be conceded that in "how" <w> does not operate to represent a consonant either.

It is of course customary, and often convenient, to describe certain letters of the alphabet as "vowels" and others as "consonants". But doing so has its limitations. Apart from anything else, it leads to the erroneous belief that there are only five vowel sounds in English. Difficulty arises because English is written with the Roman alphabet which, ignoring quantity, is perfectly adequate for representing all the vowel sounds of Latin, but not English. (The fact that we use the words "vowel" and "consonant" for both the sounds and the symbols has made this post tricky to write and I have not been able to be entirely consistent.)

Forbes

Vowels, Consonants

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