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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 ...
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 California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873 ), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...
Another type of spelling characteristic is related to word origin. For example, when representing a vowel, y represents the sound /ɪ/ in some words borrowed from Greek (reflecting an original upsilon), whereas the letter usually representing this sound in non-Greek words is the letter i .
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively. The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth").
The disuse of this letter is at least partly due to the publication of William Salesbury's Welsh New Testament and William Morgan's Welsh Bible, whose English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough k letters in their type cases to spell every /k/ as k , so the order went "C for K, because the ...
The title uses every vowel once. Each of the five chapters in this book is a lipogram. The first chapter in this book uses only words containing the vowel "A" and no other vowel. The second chapter uses only words with no vowel but "E", and so on. [27]
Oxford Companion to the English Language in its entry on vowel letters, says, "the five classic vowel letters of the Roman alphabet are A, E, I, O, U, to which Y is usually added; apart from its syllable-initial role as a semi-vowel or semi-consonant in words like year, y functions in English largely as an alternative vowel symbol to i." The ...