Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Eugenie/Rose]

vowel question.

i know that aeiou are vowels.

i know that y is sometimes a vowel: by, try, my, happy

but i recall being told in elementary school that w was sometimes a vowel. was my elementary school teacher nuts or is my memory faulty?

or, alternatively, is w sometimes a vowel?

_______________________________

Was that your best shot, savage gypsy lover?

[Bibbitybop]

W is part of the vowel system in Hangul, but not English.

Try to find a word that uses W as a vowel, one that doesn't use aeiou or y.

[The Bobster]

y and w are sometimes called "semi-vowels" by linguists. It's true that y is often employed in syllable construction and w never is, but the key, phonetically, is a definition of what a consonant is, which is usually described as a sound that requires friction or contact between teeth, tongue or soft pallate (sp?) for production. Neither y nor w need this, of course.

Bbb has it right about han-gul, by the way. Learn the Korean alphabet system, you're inevitably going to learn one or two things about the English phonetic system, especially how effed up it is with regard to recording sounds as they are spoken ... w, for instance, is always written in Korean as a fast combination of two vowels. That's because it's precisely what the w sound actually is.

As an example of effed-upedness, consider how often y is used when it doesn't make y sound - your example, "happy" - and how often w is similarly misemployed, q.v., "how."

Does any of this help? Hope so ...

[grainger]

In happy the "y" is being used correctly. At the end of a one syllable word the "y" is pronounced as an "i" E.g. My. At the end of a two or more syllable word the "y" is pronounced as an "e".

Interesting point about the "w" sound. I'd never really thought about it.

[Picotrain]

The best way to look at vowels (but probably not the best way to teach them) is to disregard traditional a, e, i, o and u in their written forms. English has around a dozen simple vowels (I say around because it varies by dialect). Think, for example, how the "a" in "pan" differs from the "a" in "pizza." Although they are written the same, they sound differently, therefore constituting different vowels. As stated previously, "w" (e.g. "water") and "y" (not as in the word "my," rather the one found in "yum") are semi-vowels. They have some traits of consonants and some of vowels. Just like regular vowels, their written representations can be misleading. In addition to the example just given, "university" also begins with a "y" sound, ergo "a university class" instead of "an university class." The English vowel system is quite irregular, but there are some rules in regards to which vowel is used where. For example, "y" at the end of a word is pronounced like "ee," except when the word has only one syllable, or in the word July, at which time it is pronounced like the word "eye."

Korean, on the other hand, has seperate symbols for each vowel, thus eliminating this hulabaloo that we have in English. I hope some of this has helped your understanding of the mess that is the English vowel. If only we had only three vowels like Arabic.....

[Tokki1]

I think your elementary teacher was nuts, personally.

[Thiuda]

In order to answer the OP�s question correctly, it is necessary to distinguish between the written representation of a language (orthography) and the sound pattern of a language (phonology), as well as draw a distinction between vowels and consonants.

The symbols used in our day-to-day writing do not accurately reflect the phonology of English, for example, the letter combination �th� is used in written English to represent /θ/ in �thin� /θɪn/ and /�/ in �this� /�ɪs/. In order to avoid confusion based on orthography, sounds are commonly represented by writing them in a phonetic alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which assigns acoustic characteristics to each symbol (Wikipedia.org, 2007).

The IPA does not have a symbol for the letter �y�, as it is transcribed as either /j/ or as a vowel, like /i:/ as in �key�, or the diphthong /aɪ/, as in �fly�. The rule here is pretty straightforward: The letter �y� is a consonant, represented in the IPA as /j/, when it is the first letter of a syllable that has more than one letter. If �y� is anywhere else in the syllable, it is a vowel, represented in the IPA as /i:/ or /a/ (Phonics on the Web, 2007).

By definition a vowel is a �sound[] in which there [is] no obstruction to the flow of air as it passes from the larynx to the lips (Roach, 2003:10).� In contrast, a consonant is most often a sound in which it is difficult, as in the case of fricatives, or impossible, as in the case of plosives, to pass air through the mouth. I say �most often� since consonants like /h/, /j/ and /w/ do not create strictures, but are still considered consonants because of their distribution (Roach, 2003).

The consonants /j/ and /w/ are called approximants, but are more commonly known as �semi-vowels�, as The Bobster pointed out. Approximants are called thus, because your articulators (tongue, teeth, lips, palate�etc.) approximate the position of consonants, but do not produce a complete consonant like /t/ and/v/ (Roach, 2003). In this they are similar to vowels, but as stated above; they are considered consonants because of the way they are distributed in English.

Distribution refers to the positions in which particular sounds can occur. So, for example, the letter combination �th� is pronounced /�ə/ if it precedes consonants (as in �the dog�), but /�i/ before vowels (as in �the apple�), but not the other way around.

So, in short, the orthographic representation �y� can be a vowel or a consonant, depending on its position in a syllable. The letter �w� is always a consonant, however, because of its phonological distribution in English � it never occurs in the position a vowel would appear in; the same is true for the letter �j�.

Finally, I would like to point out that The Bobster is incorrect in his assessment of /w/ as a �fast combination of two vowels,� it would be more correct to say that in Korean there is no orthographic representation of �w� (as a consonant), and that instead it is orthographically represented as a combination of two vowels. In the IPA the �w� sound in Korean would be transcribed as a diphthong, in which the �w� is part of the transcription, as in /wʌ/ for ㅝ (Wikipedia.org, 2007).

[The Bobster]