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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]
A silent e , in association with the Latin alphabet's five vowel characters, is one of the ways by which some of these vowel sounds are represented in English orthography. A silent e in association with the other vowels may convert a short vowel sound to a long vowel equivalent, though that may not always be the case.
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 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").
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 mid central vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages.A reduced mid central vowel is known as a schwa.The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents either sound is ə , a rotated lowercase letter e.
The cluster /sk/ could be found word-medially before a back vowel, e.g. in the words þerscan and discas, although the lack of palatalization in such forms might imply that the /s/ was shared between the first and second syllable. [167]
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.