Who's asking: Larry Willis, St. Louis, MO
Every first-grader knows -- or should know -- that English vowels are a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y. Conscientious English teachers may add, "and sometimes y and w." Larry wants to know when "w" is a vowel.
Although Welsh uses "w" as a vowel in words such as cwm (which means "valley," and is transliterated into English as "coombe"), English uses w as a vowel only in diphthongs. "W" acts as a vowel in combination with "e" and "o," in words such as new and how. It gives the letters e and o sounds those letters would never have, standing alone, and is phonetically equivalent to the true vowel "u." (It may also stand in for the silent "e," in words such as tow and show.)
In these cases, w's role as a vowel is a linguistic detail, and not something first-graders really need to worry about.
W is an interesting letter. Latin didn't have it, and it's still rare to find it in any Romance language; English adopted it from Germanic languages sometime in the Middle Ages, and it doesn't show up in manuscripts until after the Norman Conquest of 1066. What, I wonder, did we call wiggly worms before then?
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
14 comments:
they were called viggly vorms.
We called them gross.
My recollection is that the song by the 80's one hit wonder group
EBN-OZN was called "Aeiou sometimes y" no W. and since most people can only think of cwm as a word with a w as a vowel, then I move we don't consider w to be a vowel.
If pluto is not a planet, W is not a vowel
RB
Why is it that in latin (at least in my high school latin) the V is pronounced like a W, and in German, the W is pronounced like a V.
Maybe if we all agreed upon one way to pronouce it, we could eliminate it
Signed
The Commitee to Reduce the Alphabet to 25 Letters by Eliminating the W.
If you eliminate W my last name would be illis.
Larry (W) Illis
You know, you start eliminating letters and the next to go is C. Why do we need C when we have K and S? And why do we need J when we have G and Y? And B and P are practically the same sound anyway...
First they came for W. And then they came for me.
> Latin didn't have it... English adopted it from Germanic languages sometime in the Middle Ages....
Hey Answer Girl, English is a germanic language with lots of Latin vocabulary, is it not?
You're right, English is the descendant of a language that originated in northwest Germany -- but they didn't write the letter w until after 1066. Maybe they pronounced it "v" and only needed the w to recreate French's "ou" sound?
Speling iz arbitrarie ennywhey...
Being dyslexic, spelling is an adventure. Just as my wife, who gets the task of being the first to proof what I write.
Larry
Y'all need an example of "w" as a vowel?
Two
Hi--Does anybody realize that the name of the letter 'W' is "double u". Examples really wouldn't be needed.
It's sad how out of touch people are with the English language, and language in general.
The constanant sound of W is a Germanic alteration of the Latin 'V' sound which also is a 'U' in Greek--"upsilon".
Anyhow 'vowel' is an example of W being used a vowel. A trick question that sometimes appears on IQ tests asks you if the certain numbered letter in a given sentence is a vowel--and it's usually a 'w'. Go to iqtest.com for an example of this.
And lastly, in the second grade, in public school, I was taught that AEIOU sometimes Y and sometimes W were vowels.
Does the id10t that wrote "TWO" as an example that W is a vowel KNOW that... O.... itself... is a vowel...? Take a moment of silence...
Well, two without w is to,right? Is H in words like right a vowel?
Try "how," which is phonetically equivalent to "hou," as in house. Ou and ow are diphthongs--that is, two vowel sounds that kind of slide together when you say them. W and Y are often called semivowels because they go both ways, as it were, depending on the company they keep within the word. (Low morals are obviously a problem at every level of our society.) In cow, for instance, W is a vowel, but make the word coward and you can hear W working as a consonant. Similarly with Y become I in copy and copier. I could also expound on the vowel-likes, yet another class of letters with an identity crisis, but I think we've had enough angst for one column already.
Taken from the Straight Dope...
Post a Comment