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A consonant, pronounced as a voiced labial-velar approximant /w/, which is the case whenever it is at the beginning of a word, and sometimes elsewhere. A long /uː/. The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or a short-wāw-vowel mark, damma, to aid in the pronunciation by hinting to the following long vowel.
w represents a vowel sound, /oʊ/, in the word pwn, and in the Welsh loanwords cwm and crwth, it retains the Welsh pronunciation, /ʊ/. w is also used in digraphs: aw /ɔː/ , ew /(j)uː/ , ow /aʊ, oʊ/ , wherein it is usually an orthographic allograph of u in final positions.
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). [2] In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them ( a , e , i , o , u , and sometimes w and y ). [3]
This vocalic w generally represented /uː/, [3] [4] as in wss ("use"). [5] However at that time the form w was still sometimes used to represent a digraph uu (see W), not as a separate letter. In modern Welsh, "W" is simply a single letter which often represents a vowel sound. Thus words borrowed from Welsh may use w this way, such as:
The voiced labial–velar approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in certain spoken languages, including English.It is the sound denoted by the letter w in the English alphabet; [1] likewise, the symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is w , or rarely [ɰʷ], and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is w.
w can be the main vowel of a syllable (e.g. tswv) Syllables can begin with sequences such as hm-, ntxh-, nq- . Syllables ending in double vowels (especially -oo, -ee ) possibly followed by a tone letters (as in Hmoob "Hmong").
This occurred with the word how in the Old English period, and with who, whom and whose in Middle English (the latter words having had an unrounded vowel in Old English). Reduction to /w/, a development that has affected the speech of the great majority of English speakers, causing them to pronounce wh- the same as w- (sometimes called the wine ...
This table lists the vowel letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet. IPA: Vowels; Front Central Back; Close: i. y.