A,E,I,O U and sometimes W and Y

This is the way vowels were taught when I sent to elementary school (early 60's). Anybody else? And do you know of a word were W is used as a vowel?

I think w can be a vowel in the Welsh language, but that's probably not what you meant! Think of "Cwm Rhondda".

It is a vowel in Welsh, roughly equivalent in sound to 'oo'.

It is also a vowel in English, though usually (always?) as part of a diphthong. Do you pronounce sour and flower to rhyme? Presumably you accept the u in sour as a vowel... well, w performs the same function in flower. And oy = oi.

>3 Crypto-Willobie: Makes sense to me.

You could look at the w as a "helping vowel" that changes the sound of the vowels around it in words like "sewer" or "swear." In a word like "swoop," you get a funny double oo sound. It's a little like an umlaut in German that indicates you say the vowels with your lips rounded in an oo. Except in English, you make the oo sound first, then the vowel.

There was a w in Old English that functioned pretty much the way it does in English now, but never as a vowel on its own. Anglo-Saxon spelling was very regular, outside of a few dialectical differences. However, Middle English and Early Modern English had pretty irregular orthography, so you could see some creative spelling.

It would be interesting to know if w was ever used as a vowel alone in Middle English. don't recall ever seeing it used that way, but that's not my period of expertise.

However, I see an interesting afternwn ahead lwking to see if any recent lingwistsic scholarship has nowted this!

Of course w is literally a 'double u'.

There's a whole thread on the 5/7 vowels over in the I Survived the Great Vowel Shift group:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/39850#1087750

>1 Tess_W: This is the way I was taught, too! And yes, it has something to do with Welsh and Celtic languages.

According to dictionary-dot-com:

"Why is W sometimes a vowel?

"W is a rebel: it defies categories. To put it simply, it’s a little bit of both, vowel and consonant.

"Linguists call it a semivowel or glide, “a speech sound having the characteristics of both a consonant and vowel, especially W in wore and Y in your and, in some analyses, R in road and L in load.”

"Nope, this ain’t your spelling teacher’s alphabet, folks.

"In English, W can behave this way at the beginning of a syllable, where it’s followed by a full-fledged vowel (e.g., wonderful). It can also behave this way as part of a diphthong (which is a vowel plus a glide), as in How now, brown cow?"

Fun stuff - I could geek out on linguistics, I believe.

I always think of vowels as sounds that are independent from the lips; the flexing happens further back (in the vocal cords themselves?). W is dependent on lip position at least in this part of the world. I was taught aeiou and sometimes y.