Why sometimes y

It turns out that Y is not just "sometimes" a vowel. It is almost always a vowel. It is only a consonant around 2. That means about As you might guess, this is probably because -y and -ly are very common suffixes in English. And Sometimes Y? How Many Vowels Are There? If you ask an American what the English vowels are, we will almost all say the exact same thing that we learned in school as children : A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

Vowels and Consonants Before we can say how many vowels there are, we need to clarify what exactly a vowel is. The most common dictionary definitions say something like this : vowel n. On the other hand, consonant is usually defined something like this: consonant n.

Sounds and letters You may have noticed that the definitions of consonant and vowel above talk about both sounds and letters, and this is where the confusion comes from. Why is Y Special? Time Traveler. Love words? Need even more definitions? Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. What Is 'Semantic Bleaching'? How 'literally' can mean "figuratively". Literally How to use a word that literally drives some pe Is Singular 'They' a Better Choice? We have officially launched our second edition of Pronunciation Pages and it includes all of the sound spelling and pronunciation lessons as well a large number of exercises and quizzes, plus all of our new and improved sounds lists, and all of the audio for each lesson, exercise, and quiz.

All of the concepts I've talked about in this episode are included in the book, and so are the y spelling exercises. You can buy the new book in its physical form and we'll happily ship it to you, or you can download it in PDF with all of the audio in MP3 form. I really cannot express how excited I am to have this available to you.

I'll link to our products page from the transcripts for this show, which you can find by going to www. In case you're wondering, I'll also link to the free lessons that correspond to this lesson from this show's transcripts page as well. Now let's practice. First, here are some words with a y spelling representing the y sound:.

And here are the words I used as examples of the y spelling being used to represent the various vowel sounds:. Oh, one last thing, in case you're wondering: what about the letter w? Everything that is true about the letter y representing a consonant or a vowel sound is also true for the letter w.

I can only think that it's because w doesn't represent vowel sounds as often as the letter y that it isn't included in the children's chant of a, e, i, o, u , and sometimes y. The chant could be a, e, i, o, u , and sometimes y and sometimes w and it would still be true, and it would still be overly simplified. The most important idea to remember is that letters and sounds are different things. Letters represent sounds, but only sounds can actually be vowels or consonants.

You might have learned it as a chant, a song, or a simple declaration, but this is how you learned the vowels of English.

You may have wondered, why is Y so unsure of itself? Can't we just decide what it is? Why is Y a "sometimes" vowel? Because writing is not the same thing as speech.