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From: dce@hammer.UUCP (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: seven vowels?
Message-ID: <251@hammer.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Oct-83 19:32:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: hammer.251
Posted: Wed Oct 12 19:32:25 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Oct-83 09:09:29 EDT
References: <826@bronze.UUCP> <133@apollo.UUCP>
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 30

I also learned that y and w were vowels. I realize now (after taking 8
linguistics courses) that the reason that they are called this is that
they are classified as "semivowels". This means that they are both
vowels and consonants.

I can understand why my teachers could say that y is a vowel, since all
English words must contain a vowel. Look at the word "sky". In
this word, y has the sound /i/, so it is a vowel. Also, in
some languages, like Welsh, there are words which contain a w and
some consonants (Like Wm Leler's first name). Therefore, since there
are words spoken by English speakers like 'Wm', w can be considered
a vowel sometimes, just as y can.

The whole problem is that grade school teachers are trying to teach
the language from words. This is very difficult to teach because
of the exceptions in spelling.

English is not the only language with problems like this. In a phonology
class I took last year, we had two Telugu speakers (Telugu is a language
of Southeastern India) who gave us words in the language. They gave
us quite a few words that had a "formal" form and an "informal" form.
While trying to come up with the phonemes for the language, we
encountered a lot of problems, since the "formal" words had the
same meanings as the similar-sounding "informal" words and we
could not find any phoneme pairs in complementary distribution.
We found out later that "formal" words were the written words, and
the "informal" words were the spoken words. This meant that the data
was screwed up and we ended up ditching half of it.

			David