I posted similar comments over on Diercks' blog and Michelle posted a comment that helps illumine the situation.
So here is the clarifying material concerning W as a vowel from David Black and Michelle Mosher.
Dave Black directs us here.
And Michelle writes the following in the comments on Diercks' page:
so W and Y aren't really vowels, but they're not really consonants either. some linguists call them "semi-vowels" because of the way they're sort of in-between.
W is actually a lot like U (and Y is a lot like EE). So if you say "snow" with a "u" at the end instead of a "w" it'll still sound pretty similar. Try saying "snou" (with a normal "oh" sound and a normal "uu" sound.
It's easier to tell with a word like "water". Try replacing the w with u: u-ater. Now say it fast.
so yeah, W and y are kind of vowels, but not really.
So there you have two very knowledgable people helping us understand the notion that W can indeed serve as a vowel.
Maybe they have changed my opinion on the matter (yes I know this contradicts what I said in my earlier post) or maybe not. I guess I still need to think about this some more.
Hopefully some Lent thoughts will be posted soon.
3 comments:
I just think its funny how much time and energy you are putting into this crazy consonantal crusade of yours. Shouldn't you be studying or something? Since you're apparently not doing that, you're coming to visit me on March 28th. Lawrence KS. Be there.
Kudos for another linguisticky post.
Another thing that I didn't mention the last time but is probably worth saying: it's really easy for us to confuse our English orthography system (spelling, etc.) with pronunciation, but the two (due to numerous historical shifts like the great vowel shift and the proliferation of borrowed words in English) are actually pretty far apart.
The reason why we're taught that the vowels in English are A, E, I, O, and U, and sometimes Y is purely orthographical. We're told that every word must have at least one vowel in it, thus words like "my" gives us problems unless we say that Y is sometimes a vowel. Even though [w] and [j] (the IPA symbol for y) fulfill fairly similar functions phonetically (in terms of pronunciation), they don't fulfill the same types of functions orthographically (in terms of spelling). There are no words in English that are spelled with only consonants and W, so we're not taught in elementary school to treat W as a "sometimes vowel."
Anyways, you didn't really need to know that. I just happened to want to procrastinate from the paper I'm supposed to be writing on the grammaticalization of serial verb constructions in Akan.
Another fun example is "ghoti".
/gh/ is pronounced as [f] as in 'laugh'
/o/ is pronounced like the o in 'women'
/ti/ is pronounced like the sh in 'nation'
So "ghoti" is really "fish."
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