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English orthography typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters a, e, i, o, u , as well as y , which may also be a consonant depending on context. However, outside of abbreviations, there are a handful of words in English that do not have vowels, either because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters ...
close-mid front rounded vowel, open-mid front rounded vowel or mid front rounded vowel: ø, œ or ø̞: Americanist and Uralicist notation ü: u with diaeresis: close front rounded vowel or near-close near-front rounded vowel: y or ʏ: Americanist and Uralicist notation k’ t’ etc. right single quotation mark: Korean fortis k͈ t͈ etc.
There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one phonetic and the other phonological.. In the phonetic definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English "ah" / ɑː / or "oh" / oʊ /, produced with an open vocal tract; it is median (the air escapes along the middle of the tongue), oral (at least some of the airflow must escape through the mouth), frictionless and continuant. [4]
The letter y has double function (modifying the vowel as well as being pronounced as [j] or [i]) in the words payer, balayer, moyen, essuyer, pays, etc., but in some words it has only a single function: [j] in bayer, mayonnaise, coyote; modifying the vowel at the end of proper names like Chardonnay and Fourcroy.
It is unusual for a language to contrast a semivowel and a diphthong containing an equivalent vowel, [citation needed] but Romanian contrasts the diphthong /e̯a/ with /ja/, a perceptually similar approximant-vowel sequence. The diphthong is analyzed as a single segment, and the approximant-vowel sequence is analyzed as two separate segments.
The consonant sounds represented by the letters W and Y in English (/w/ and /j/ as in went /wɛnt/ and yes /jɛs/) are referred to as semi-vowels (or glides) by linguists, however this is a description that applies to the sounds represented by the letters and not to the letters themselves.
The short vowels are / æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ / while the equivalent long vowels are / eɪ iː aɪ oʊ j uː /. However, because of the complications of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowel is not always simply a lengthened version of the corresponding short one; and in most cases (for example with ride) is in fact a diphthong (/ r aɪ d /).
"and a large number of Modern English words spell the /ɪ/ and /aɪ/ sounds with y " makes sense, though this isn't a "but" since it just furthers the notion that y is a vowel. "such as sky, why, tryst, gym, hymn, lynx, lynch, myth, wyrm, myrrh, rhythm, pygmy, gypsy, flyby, and syzygy which are vowels in this case."