[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Off-hand, it seems that in English "y" mostly* is [j] if in initial position, > otherwise it's either [i] or [ai]. So it's either one consonant, or one or two > vowels...
>From a philological point of view, initial "y" in Modern English originally derives >from a palatal "g" [j] in Old English. Similarly, final "y" in Modern English originally derives from final "ig" [ij] in Old English (final y in words of non-OE etymology are later innovations), and thus the Modern English final y can be considered to be a silent consonant preceded by an elided letter "i". Only the medial y (as in "wynn") is a true vowel, deriving from Old English "y" [y]. BTW, the letter wynn [U+01BF and U+01F7] (derived from the rune of the same name [U+16B9]) represents Old English "w", and should not be considered a vowel. "y" is an ambiguous case in Modern English, but in Welsh it is unequivocally a vowel; and I'm sure that there are orthographies where "y" is unequivocally a consonant. Which all goes to show, as several of you have pointed out, that it really is meaningless to try to make a generalised vowel/consonant distinction. Andrew
