On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 05:11:24AM +0900, Dan Kogai wrote: > > As all English users know (with certain degrees of pain), you can't > tell how you pronounce a given letter until you see the whole word or > even the whole sentence. In that sense I doubt how relevant > to categorize alphabets between vowels and consonants -- unless you are > playing Wheel of Fortune (I would love to tantalize the TV director by > saying "It's bogus that I can't buy a 'Y'!" :).
it is similar to asking Chinese "how is this radical pronounced?" Without context, it is nothing > > And how about an 'e', a letter that most would believe 100% vowel? See > "Cate" vs. "Cat". That particular 'e' is not a vowel; it is not even > pronounced! It's a modifier that turns the previous vowel into > diphthong. And how about an 'h' in "hour"? > > And how about an 'i' for "Linux"? A vowel ? or a diphthong? certainly a vowel, since "linux" is a swedish word, and swedish has rather straightforward categorization of graphemes/phonemes into vowels and consonants :-) . > > I am no linguist but so far as I see, such languages are rather rare > that a given "letter" in that particular language is definitively and > unambiguously classified as a vowel or a consonant (one great rarity is > Korean). For most cases we can only tell 'vowelish' or > 'consonantish'.... on the contrary, for languages with "good enough" phonematic writing system, the graphemes are oficially categorized into vowels/consonants/(semivowels etc...). It might not correspond always to the linguistic _function_ of phonemes (see syllabic l and r), but such categorization has its merits. (notice that one grapheme != one character, e.g. german ch or tsch. In English orthography, concept of grapheme is rather fuzzy) -- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garab�k http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
