In second grade I got into an argument with my teacher about how R, L, and W should also be in the "sometimes" category of vowels, she thought I was crazy. Now I have a linguistics degree and a UA-cam channel so I declare 16 years later that I won the argument 😎
@@grotesqburlesk so basically in most varieties of American English, [ɹ̩] and [ɫ̩] are common realizations in unstressed syllables where you may see written "er" "le" "or" "al", etc. It's written as a vowel paired with R or L but in actual speech it comes out as syllabic consonants.
Another piece of evidence for considering [j] and [w] to be consonants rather than vowels is that sound changes that apply only to vowels (both diachronically and synchronically) typically *don't* apply to semivowels, and sound changes that apply only to consonants often do apply to semivowels as well.
In German, y exists in mostly Greek loanwords and is pronounced as either [yː] or [ʏ] like Sympathie /zʏmpʰaˈtʰiː/, y also exists in some English loanwords as [iː] like Handy /ˈhɛndiː/.
4:08 - I've actually heard some pretty good arguments for why words like 'pie' should actually be transcribed as /paj/. There are lots of components to the argument--Dr Geoff Lindsey has a 30 minute video on the topic. But, one of many points is that transcribing the 'long vowels' of English as closing diphthongs like /ij/ /uw/ /aj/ ej/ etc. helps explain why some vowels can have other vowels directly following them and others can't. English hates hiatus, so transcribing a word like 'react' as /ɹi:ækt/ makes it hard to explain. But the more accurate /ɹijækt/ shows that there actually isn't any hiatus at all. I don't explain it as well as he does so I recommend the whole Geoff Lindsey video. Very interesting stuff, definitely convinced me
I just found his channel recently, and have been binge-watching all his videos. The one you're referring to is called "Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG". In it, he also shows how the word "me" played backwards sounds like /jɪm/, which demonstrates that there is a /j/ there.
I think you can make a stronger case for it being a vowel due to the way it’s formed in syllable onset (which as you pointed out is where people will consider it consonantal). The sound is itself the manifestation of the transition period between open oral posture to another. The difference at syllable onset is that the mouth starts in the position of what _would be_ the preceding vowel, but no phonation is made. The vocal cords activate after the transition position has been reached. This can also be observed when listening to speakers whose native language lacks such phonemes, and as a result they will articulate the y-onset with a short vowel sound in front of it because they are unused to not phonating until the transition point is reached. Because of this, we can definitively consider “y” to be a vowel (or at least the transition between them which we dub a “semi-vowel”).
1:30 you pronounced /ʝ/ as a velar /ɣ/! The sound /ʝ/ is fully palatal, not velar in the slightest. Also, to add: in Spanish, the letter Y can also be pronounced /j/ (in all variants postvocalically, and in some in all cases), /ɟ͡ʝ/ in Spain and Latin America, /ʃ/ in Buenos Aires and /ʒ/ in Uruguay.
in greek, where both the latin and cyrillic took the letter from, Yυ was pronounced /u/ i ancient attic, /y/ in classical greek and in modern greek it's /i/ except in the digraph oυ which is prnounced /u/ and in αυ and ευ it's pronounced either /f/ or /v/ also making this i think a "more consonantal" sound than the spanish example given
In Welsh, represents the vowels: /ə/ /ɨ/ (and in Southern dialects, /i/). /j/ is represented with , as it is in Latin. represents /u/ /ʊ/ and /w/. I and W are tauɡht as being both vowels and consonants in Welsh classrooms, and no one bats an eye. So this whole, 'Is Y a vowel or a consonant?' debate in English has always come across as silly to me. It's both (e.g. Yes, partY), and there's literally nothing incorrect about saying so. Also, Y is the least of English's orthographical worries.
I don’t have much to add to this debate, just wanted to mention that close vowels and their semivowel equivalents are not phonetically identical; the semivowels are essentially extremely tense vowels, as you can feel when you pronounce the sounds [ji] and [wu]. For that reason, syllabic semivowels do exist in some languages (like Malagasy) though they usually lenite to their vowel forms. I personally think all liquids and semivowels are consonants, but in terms of the grapheme in English I’d say it’s more a vowel with a semivowel allophone.
semi-vowels are super interesting. In French we realize most of our diphthongs impicating /i/, /u/, and / y/ respectively as /j/, /w/ and /ɥ/, and we don't even realize it, I had to read some phonology to acknowledge it. In Hungarian, the orthography exclusively exists to signal a palatal digraph, so they have gy, ty, ny and ly. Each is for a unique sound, but as I understand, is now the same sound as , /j/.
In La Platan Spanish the /j/ sound morphed into a /ʒ/ sound after the letter y in Spanish had already come to be used for consonant /j/, so in La Platan Spanish is pronounced like /ʒo/ alongside (As in “Como se llamas”) being /ʒamas/.
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz English Transcription; "GZHE-gozh bzhen-chy-shchy-KYE-veech" Y in Polish is [ɨ] but English textbooks might write [ɪ̞] to make it easier for English-speakers.
In Hebrew, most instances of there being an [i] sound are followed by Yud, the character that makes the [j] sound. For example, the word גומי “rubber” can be romanized as “gumi,” but it would be more accurate to romanize it as “gumiy”
The tweet listing ten vowels of Cyrillic makes me take psychic damage. The argument is right there. It would make it itself, just show й. And while there, why not include ъ and ь. Claim there are 13 vowels in Cyrillic. You can't get more spicier than that. (I guess you could argue stress/reduction creates separate phonemes, but when the discussion is purely centered around written letters, I don't feel like coming in with that level of arm-chair linguistics)
I always thought it was ridiculous when teachers told us the vowels are "AEIOU and sometimes Y". Why did they never explain that it is actually a semi-vowel, and that only when it precedes a vowel? And why did they never explain that W is also a semi-vowel?
>there really isn't a good reason to transcribe it with a semi-vowel instead of as a vowel sequence There are plenty of good reasons to transcribe it with a semivowel instead of a diphthong. It doesn't trigger linking /r/ in Standard Southern British English, for one, which cleans up the rules for linking /r/ very cleanly. Linking /r/ appears intervocalically, and that rule would predict "pie in" as */paɪrɪn/ instead of the correct /pajɪn/. The linking /r/ is blocked by another approximant.
Why is /w/ said to be a "labial-velar fricative"? What is velar about it? I would have thought it would simply be a "bilabial approximant", just like how /j/ is the "palatal approximant". And thus it would be on the IPA chart itself, rather than listed under "Other Symbols".
why r semivowels never in the nucleus? /pɪt/ and /pit/ r both different from /pj̩t/ for me, bc tho /j/ doesnt touch anything, it does create some friction
Wait, where are GenAm's 19 vowel phonemes? I can think of only 14, and 15 if you treat the STRUT as separate from commA (which it isn't, they're allophonic), and it goes down to 13 if you have a cot-caught merger, which is extremely common. Are you counting r-colored schwa as a vowel phoneme? Even with that it'd be 16.
@@karlpoppins Debatable. These sounds are claimed to be independent vowel phonemes on their own right because, for example, in words like "far" the r "bleeds in" into the vowel and influences it's relaisation in American English. That is why I have chosen to use [ɑɚ] for this vowel. I could definitely have used [ɑɹ], but that doesn't reflect the r-coloring process in the vowel. Maybe I should have used something like [ɑʳ]. It's the same situation in the other sequences I've listed, like [ʊɚ]
Basically you will never put your tongue in the same *exact* position, and also vowels are basically formed by multiple harmonic resonances which could always theoretically differ by like, .00001 HZ or whatever
Hear me out. Vowels should not be by definition frictionless. You could use fricatives as vowels, and they should be considered as semi-vowels. You can say msm, tsm, shs, etc. You could make a language that only uses fricatives for vowels instead of what are normally classified as vowels.
@@oyoo3323 You're missing my point. I know what they are called. I'm saying they shouldn't be called that. I'm saying we should redefine what it means to be a vowel.
@@DylanMatthewTurner why...? What you're describing already has a defined Linguistic term: a nucleus. What you're proposing is not redefining a vowel, but relabelling what a nucleus is.
@@oyoo3323 Vowels serve a variety of functions, but if you think about those functions in more depth, you realize that fricatives can serve all of the same functions. If two things can do the same jobs, even if one may do them better, it's silly to analyze them as if they're different things. A wooden hammer and a metal hammer are still both hammers afterall.
@@DylanMatthewTurner that last line of yours is true, but you seem to fail to understand ðat what you're suggesting is not calling both wooden and metal hammers "hammers", but referring to both as "wooden hammers". Both vowels and fricatives (actually more, let's stick to what you said) can be put under the overarching category of "nucleus". Vowels are a type of nucleus. Referring to all nuclei as vowels is equivalent to referring to all said hammers as "wooden hammers", regardless of whether they are wooden or not; it is not equivalent to calling them all "hammers".
In Romanian school books, the diphtongs and triphtongs are often described as semivowels. But we have some crazy clusters, like [jo̯a], [e̯o̯a], or [e̯u]. For exampleː ⟨Ioan⟩ [jo̯an] (= John), ⟨leoarcă⟩ [ˈle̯o̯ar.kə] (=drenched), ⟨vreun⟩ [vre̯un] (= some, some kind of, any; masculine, singular). This concept isn’t new to me. In fact, I found it a little strange when I first saw /j/ and /w/ described as consonants.
Instead of arguing uheter "y" is a vouel, ue should just get rid of it completeli and replace it uith "i". Then everione should be happi. Same uith "w'.
But W never serves as the nucleus of a syllable. Also, unrelated to that, Y is also the modern symbol for thorn, and exists only in one current word, "ye." And this is a native meaning straight out of old English, not some loanword crap like "acrylic" where it's basically the Greek upsilon shoved into a language where it doesn't belong.
Actually, you're quite far off on that. Both Old English and Old Norse had y occurring naturally in native vocabulary, used to indicate the /y/ vowel. In fact, its vowel realisations are directly descended from said phoneme. On the other hand, its consonant realisation is descended from an older use of G in English.
But these are indeed Russian Cyrillic alphabets. In Ukrainian for example, и and е are not palatalised, they instead use і and є to represent the respective palatalised vowels in Russian.
@@arturiaemiya8922 These graphs also exist in Ukrainian and Bulgarian and serve the same function. They're not treated as separate vowels. Russian treats them as allophones of the five standard vowels /a, i, o, u, e/. Don't think of them as a vowel that palatalises the preceding consonant but rather as a different vowel graph that appears after a palatalised consonant. As a result, it can be thought of that Russian has five (or six, [ɨ] is contested whether or not it's a separate phoneme) and ten vowel graphs ⟨а⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨и⟩, ⟨о⟩, ⟨у⟩, ⟨ы⟩, ⟨э⟩, ⟨ю⟩, ⟨я⟩. I get that the example is of the Russian alphabet. That's fine. However, I've noticed this phenomenon to refer to any Cyrillic letter as "a Russian letter" or "the Russian alphabet". I don't need to explain why this could be considered offensive and insensitive, considering the current global events and a common narrative employed by certain Russian people. Not to mention the fact that the Cyrillic alphabet originated nowhere near modern-day Russia.
In second grade I got into an argument with my teacher about how R, L, and W should also be in the "sometimes" category of vowels, she thought I was crazy. Now I have a linguistics degree and a UA-cam channel so I declare 16 years later that I won the argument 😎
Why W?
i get the others, but ⟨l⟩ ? the tongue touches the roof of the mouth so I would think that makes it a consonant always ?
@@NaughtyKlausbc semivowel i presume
can you explain why r and l should be in vowels? my language (bengali) has both r and l in vowels (as well as consonants). i always wondered why
@@grotesqburlesk so basically in most varieties of American English, [ɹ̩] and [ɫ̩] are common realizations in unstressed syllables where you may see written "er" "le" "or" "al", etc. It's written as a vowel paired with R or L but in actual speech it comes out as syllabic consonants.
Another piece of evidence for considering [j] and [w] to be consonants rather than vowels is that sound changes that apply only to vowels (both diachronically and synchronically) typically *don't* apply to semivowels, and sound changes that apply only to consonants often do apply to semivowels as well.
Yes, it’s the rounded equivalent of [i].
e͡ɪ˦˧ː 🤌
It is elongated u
You really saw the title, opened the video and made a comment at 0:00, didn't you?
wrong, it was capital. so it's rounded [ɪ]
1:28 - in rioplatense spanish, the letter y (as well as ll) has evolved to be pronounced as /ʃ/, which i think is even more consonanty.
In German, y exists in mostly Greek loanwords and is pronounced as either [yː] or [ʏ] like Sympathie /zʏmpʰaˈtʰiː/, y also exists in some English loanwords as [iː] like Handy /ˈhɛndiː/.
Handy isn't an English loanword
@@morriskaller3549 the meaning is different but the word itself is still taken from English
4:08 - I've actually heard some pretty good arguments for why words like 'pie' should actually be transcribed as /paj/. There are lots of components to the argument--Dr Geoff Lindsey has a 30 minute video on the topic. But, one of many points is that transcribing the 'long vowels' of English as closing diphthongs like /ij/ /uw/ /aj/ ej/ etc. helps explain why some vowels can have other vowels directly following them and others can't. English hates hiatus, so transcribing a word like 'react' as /ɹi:ækt/ makes it hard to explain. But the more accurate /ɹijækt/ shows that there actually isn't any hiatus at all. I don't explain it as well as he does so I recommend the whole Geoff Lindsey video. Very interesting stuff, definitely convinced me
I just found his channel recently, and have been binge-watching all his videos. The one you're referring to is called "Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG". In it, he also shows how the word "me" played backwards sounds like /jɪm/, which demonstrates that there is a /j/ there.
“vowels are frictionless” Viby-I has entered the chat
No. Y is a letter - a grapheme. Vowels are phonemes.
Yes
🤓
Yes, and I am aware þat I just used it as a consonant, but "U" is also a sort of consonant in "Unicycle".
sometimes it is
Y?
Then riddle me this Batman, is our lord's blessing upon this world Mayonaise an Instrument?
@Elaqgarah Ulelpon there's a lot to unpack here
In polish it is a vowel
I think you can make a stronger case for it being a vowel due to the way it’s formed in syllable onset (which as you pointed out is where people will consider it consonantal).
The sound is itself the manifestation of the transition period between open oral posture to another. The difference at syllable onset is that the mouth starts in the position of what _would be_ the preceding vowel, but no phonation is made. The vocal cords activate after the transition position has been reached.
This can also be observed when listening to speakers whose native language lacks such phonemes, and as a result they will articulate the y-onset with a short vowel sound in front of it because they are unused to not phonating until the transition point is reached.
Because of this, we can definitively consider “y” to be a vowel (or at least the transition between them which we dub a “semi-vowel”).
1:30 you pronounced /ʝ/ as a velar /ɣ/! The sound /ʝ/ is fully palatal, not velar in the slightest.
Also, to add: in Spanish, the letter Y can also be pronounced /j/ (in all variants postvocalically, and in some in all cases), /ɟ͡ʝ/ in Spain and Latin America, /ʃ/ in Buenos Aires and /ʒ/ in Uruguay.
I heard that lmao as a Scots Gaelic speaker that fucked me up, also he pronounced /ç/ incorrectly which seems hard seeing as it’s literally in English
Thank you! I'm a native spanish speaker and it was bothering me so much
For languages using the Cyrillic letters, Уу is usually pronounced as /u/, Үү is usually pronounced as /y/, Ўy̆ is usually pronounced as /w/.
in greek, where both the latin and cyrillic took the letter from, Yυ was pronounced /u/ i ancient attic, /y/ in classical greek and in modern greek it's /i/ except in the digraph oυ which is prnounced /u/ and in αυ and ευ it's pronounced either /f/ or /v/ also making this i think a "more consonantal" sound than the spanish example given
In Welsh, represents the vowels: /ə/ /ɨ/ (and in Southern dialects, /i/).
/j/ is represented with , as it is in Latin.
represents /u/ /ʊ/ and /w/.
I and W are tauɡht as being both vowels and consonants in Welsh classrooms, and no one bats an eye. So this whole, 'Is Y a vowel or a consonant?' debate in English has always come across as silly to me. It's both (e.g. Yes, partY), and there's literally nothing incorrect about saying so.
Also, Y is the least of English's orthographical worries.
On "Wheel of Fortune," Y is _always_ a consonant
I don’t have much to add to this debate, just wanted to mention that close vowels and their semivowel equivalents are not phonetically identical; the semivowels are essentially extremely tense vowels, as you can feel when you pronounce the sounds [ji] and [wu].
For that reason, syllabic semivowels do exist in some languages (like Malagasy) though they usually lenite to their vowel forms.
I personally think all liquids and semivowels are consonants, but in terms of the grapheme in English I’d say it’s more a vowel with a semivowel allophone.
semi-vowels are super interesting.
In French we realize most of our diphthongs impicating /i/, /u/, and / y/ respectively as /j/, /w/ and /ɥ/, and we don't even realize it, I had to read some phonology to acknowledge it.
In Hungarian, the orthography exclusively exists to signal a palatal digraph, so they have gy, ty, ny and ly. Each is for a unique sound, but as I understand, is now the same sound as , /j/.
In La Platan Spanish the /j/ sound morphed into a /ʒ/ sound after the letter y in Spanish had already come to be used for consonant /j/, so in La Platan Spanish is pronounced like /ʒo/ alongside (As in “Como se llamas”) being /ʒamas/.
only sometimes
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz
English Transcription; "GZHE-gozh bzhen-chy-shchy-KYE-veech"
Y in Polish is [ɨ] but English textbooks might write [ɪ̞] to make it easier for English-speakers.
the original polish is less confusing than the english transcription for me, an english speaker who knows absolutely no polish
Such a pretty name. I used to think Zbigniew Brzezinski was bad
5:24 if so then english also has a syllabic glyph: ; since it represents (in some cases) /ju:/.
In Hebrew, most instances of there being an [i] sound are followed by Yud, the character that makes the [j] sound. For example, the word גומי “rubber” can be romanized as “gumi,” but it would be more accurate to romanize it as “gumiy”
even consonants can be syllabic, like L, R, etc, in some Slavic language there are lots of examples
L is syllabic in English in words like "people" or "bottle"
Yamyam means cannibal lol
When I pronunce /j/, the sides of my tongue make contact with the molars
y is an ugly vowel but a sexy consonant
3:48 It not though
The tweet listing ten vowels of Cyrillic makes me take psychic damage.
The argument is right there. It would make it itself, just show й.
And while there, why not include ъ and ь. Claim there are 13 vowels in Cyrillic. You can't get more spicier than that.
(I guess you could argue stress/reduction creates separate phonemes, but when the discussion is purely centered around written letters, I don't feel like coming in with that level of arm-chair linguistics)
1:32 Ahh yes, [ɣ]
I always thought it was ridiculous when teachers told us the vowels are "AEIOU and sometimes Y". Why did they never explain that it is actually a semi-vowel, and that only when it precedes a vowel? And why did they never explain that W is also a semi-vowel?
It's a consonant that can function as a vowel
What a nice explanation
Good job...
Btw й is considered consonant in Russian
>there really isn't a good reason to transcribe it with a semi-vowel instead of as a vowel sequence
There are plenty of good reasons to transcribe it with a semivowel instead of a diphthong. It doesn't trigger linking /r/ in Standard Southern British English, for one, which cleans up the rules for linking /r/ very cleanly. Linking /r/ appears intervocalically, and that rule would predict "pie in" as */paɪrɪn/ instead of the correct /pajɪn/. The linking /r/ is blocked by another approximant.
So I guess it's time to talk about syllabic consonants like r, m, (ng) etcetc.
sometimes i even wonder if the vowel (a) is merely a syllabic unaspirated voiceless glottal fricative (an unaspiratd /h/) or whatever bullshit.
3:30 beautiful diagram♥♥♥ im speechless
Why is /w/ said to be a "labial-velar fricative"? What is velar about it? I would have thought it would simply be a "bilabial approximant", just like how /j/ is the "palatal approximant". And thus it would be on the IPA chart itself, rather than listed under "Other Symbols".
Because there's velar motion. There is also a labio-palatal approximant ("oui" in french), and a separate solely labial approximant.
2:24 something is a little sus with this picture....
0:48 What's the first?
1:03 cool glass.
2:22 Bilabial Plosive is kind of sus
HAHA I CAUGHT THAT BEER BRAND PUN AT 1:01
H is a vowel
4:10 i mean it's easier to type and avoids h/aj/atus
booyah
why r semivowels never in the nucleus? /pɪt/ and /pit/ r both different from /pj̩t/ for me, bc tho /j/ doesnt touch anything, it does create some friction
Wait, where are GenAm's 19 vowel phonemes? I can think of only 14, and 15 if you treat the STRUT as separate from commA (which it isn't, they're allophonic), and it goes down to 13 if you have a cot-caught merger, which is extremely common. Are you counting r-colored schwa as a vowel phoneme? Even with that it'd be 16.
If you include the rest of the r coloured vowels the number goes up. /ɚ ɝ ɑɚ ɛɚ ɔɚ ɪɚ ʊɚ/
@@k.umquat8604 I really don't think these should be counted as phonemes, e.g. /ʊɚ/ is two phonemes, not one.
@@karlpoppins Debatable. These sounds are claimed to be independent vowel phonemes on their own right because, for example, in words like "far" the r "bleeds in" into the vowel and influences it's relaisation in American English. That is why I have chosen to use [ɑɚ] for this vowel. I could definitely have used [ɑɹ], but that doesn't reflect the r-coloring process in the vowel. Maybe I should have used something like [ɑʳ]. It's the same situation in the other sequences I've listed, like [ʊɚ]
@@k.umquat8604 That seems like allophony, though, which is why I don't consider any of the r-colored vowels to be phonemes.
@@karlpoppins Again, this is just an argument. I am not saying that this is definitely true.
r is a vowel
yes
epic = epyc vid
1:59 technically it's /ɪj/ or /ɪ/
[0:52] Can someone elaborate on this? Unless I am misunderstanding, is this about the exact pitch or specifically about diphthongs or something?
Basically you will never put your tongue in the same *exact* position, and also vowels are basically formed by multiple harmonic resonances which could always theoretically differ by like, .00001 HZ or whatever
AEIOUWY GO FOR WELSH PRONUNCIATION OF W (btw I’m not from wales)
/y/ is the best vowel
eur*sian detected 🤮
ɚ is the best vowel 😎
Ü
Þis is such a good video ☻
I'm fairly certain my tongue doesn't come into contact with any of my teeth when pronouncing /k/, which is a consonant.
/k/ is a dorsal consonant, it is produced when the back portion of the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth.
@@PlatinumAltaria Thanks. Is this not the case with /j/, however?
@@starseeing /j/ is slightly further forward in the mouth, and it doesn't make contact.
@@PlatinumAltaria The sides of my tongue definitely make contact with my molars when producing /j/, but that might be insufficient to count.
y can also be pronounced as "th"
Y tho
Hear me out. Vowels should not be by definition frictionless. You could use fricatives as vowels, and they should be considered as semi-vowels. You can say msm, tsm, shs, etc. You could make a language that only uses fricatives for vowels instead of what are normally classified as vowels.
Those aren't vowels, mate. Those are called syllabic consonants. Consonants inserted into nucleus positions.
@@oyoo3323 You're missing my point. I know what they are called. I'm saying they shouldn't be called that. I'm saying we should redefine what it means to be a vowel.
@@DylanMatthewTurner why...? What you're describing already has a defined Linguistic term: a nucleus. What you're proposing is not redefining a vowel, but relabelling what a nucleus is.
@@oyoo3323 Vowels serve a variety of functions, but if you think about those functions in more depth, you realize that fricatives can serve all of the same functions. If two things can do the same jobs, even if one may do them better, it's silly to analyze them as if they're different things. A wooden hammer and a metal hammer are still both hammers afterall.
@@DylanMatthewTurner that last line of yours is true, but you seem to fail to understand ðat what you're suggesting is not calling both wooden and metal hammers "hammers", but referring to both as "wooden hammers". Both vowels and fricatives (actually more, let's stick to what you said) can be put under the overarching category of "nucleus". Vowels are a type of nucleus. Referring to all nuclei as vowels is equivalent to referring to all said hammers as "wooden hammers", regardless of whether they are wooden or not; it is not equivalent to calling them all "hammers".
No one on UA-cam is as consistently misinformed as Knowing Better...
In Romanian school books, the diphtongs and triphtongs are often described as semivowels. But we have some crazy clusters, like [jo̯a], [e̯o̯a], or [e̯u]. For exampleː ⟨Ioan⟩ [jo̯an] (= John), ⟨leoarcă⟩ [ˈle̯o̯ar.kə] (=drenched), ⟨vreun⟩ [vre̯un] (= some, some kind of, any; masculine, singular). This concept isn’t new to me. In fact, I found it a little strange when I first saw /j/ and /w/ described as consonants.
GA English most certainly does not have 19 vowels. No idea where you even got that tbh.
Diphthongs are included
Instead of arguing uheter "y" is a vouel, ue should just get rid of it completeli and replace it uith "i". Then everione should be happi. Same uith "w'.
I can undeststand the argument for y, but why w?
The waffle house has found its new host.
But W never serves as the nucleus of a syllable. Also, unrelated to that, Y is also the modern symbol for thorn, and exists only in one current word, "ye." And this is a native meaning straight out of old English, not some loanword crap like "acrylic" where it's basically the Greek upsilon shoved into a language where it doesn't belong.
The only reason English has a Y at all is precisely to preserve Greek spellings, which is also why we have C.
@@PlatinumAltaria I don't think old English had a lot of Greek loanwords though, that seems like more of a Renaissance thing
pwn, cwm, crwth and cwtch
Actually, you're quite far off on that. Both Old English and Old Norse had y occurring naturally in native vocabulary, used to indicate the /y/ vowel. In fact, its vowel realisations are directly descended from said phoneme. On the other hand, its consonant realisation is descended from an older use of G in English.
Can we please stop referring to Cyrillic as the Russian alphabet? In this current age?
That's like referring to the Latin alphabet as the English alphabet
But these are indeed Russian Cyrillic alphabets. In Ukrainian for example, и and е are not palatalised, they instead use і and є to represent the respective palatalised vowels in Russian.
L bozo not talking about Cyrillic
@@ConnorQuimby You know, that's not how you build a community and an audience.
@@arturiaemiya8922 These graphs also exist in Ukrainian and Bulgarian and serve the same function. They're not treated as separate vowels. Russian treats them as allophones of the five standard vowels /a, i, o, u, e/. Don't think of them as a vowel that palatalises the preceding consonant but rather as a different vowel graph that appears after a palatalised consonant. As a result, it can be thought of that Russian has five (or six, [ɨ] is contested whether or not it's a separate phoneme) and ten vowel graphs ⟨а⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨и⟩, ⟨о⟩, ⟨у⟩, ⟨ы⟩, ⟨э⟩, ⟨ю⟩, ⟨я⟩.
I get that the example is of the Russian alphabet. That's fine. However, I've noticed this phenomenon to refer to any Cyrillic letter as "a Russian letter" or "the Russian alphabet". I don't need to explain why this could be considered offensive and insensitive, considering the current global events and a common narrative employed by certain Russian people. Not to mention the fact that the Cyrillic alphabet originated nowhere near modern-day Russia.