Vowel movements
Jun. 8th, 2010 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
undyingkingI'm interested to learn what people think a vowel is. For reasons that will be explained further down the post, once you've done the poll!
[Poll #1575745]
We were at a pub quiz the other day where a question was: Name a six-letter word in English that starts and finishes with the same letter, a vowel; and has no other vowels inbetween. ie. the pattern is 'v1234v' where both vs are the same vowel, and 1,2,3,4 are consonants which may be the same or different. Then name another six-letter word that also fits this pattern.
We got one quite quickly, but on a second being suggested, there was a difference of opinion about whether it counted or not: it had a 'y' in the middle, pronounced as a long 'i' sound. One group argued that only a, e, i o and u are vowels, so y is definitely a consonant. Another argued that although y is sometimes a consonant, when it's pronounced like i then it's a vowel. A third opinion was that it depended if it was written or spoken. What would you have said?
And, for a bonus, can you get the two words? The one we got quickly is the name of a common medical complaint. The one with a 'y' in the middle (which, it turned out, didn't count, as the quizmaster was using the aeiou interpretation) is the name of a category of biological substance. The official second answer which we didn't get, is a highly obscure topographical term (and is a plural, if that helps).
Also I'm interested to know, people who are knowledgable about other languages, whether they handle these things more sensibly?
[Poll #1575745]
We were at a pub quiz the other day where a question was: Name a six-letter word in English that starts and finishes with the same letter, a vowel; and has no other vowels inbetween. ie. the pattern is 'v1234v' where both vs are the same vowel, and 1,2,3,4 are consonants which may be the same or different. Then name another six-letter word that also fits this pattern.
We got one quite quickly, but on a second being suggested, there was a difference of opinion about whether it counted or not: it had a 'y' in the middle, pronounced as a long 'i' sound. One group argued that only a, e, i o and u are vowels, so y is definitely a consonant. Another argued that although y is sometimes a consonant, when it's pronounced like i then it's a vowel. A third opinion was that it depended if it was written or spoken. What would you have said?
And, for a bonus, can you get the two words? The one we got quickly is the name of a common medical complaint. The one with a 'y' in the middle (which, it turned out, didn't count, as the quizmaster was using the aeiou interpretation) is the name of a category of biological substance. The official second answer which we didn't get, is a highly obscure topographical term (and is a plural, if that helps).
Also I'm interested to know, people who are knowledgable about other languages, whether they handle these things more sensibly?
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 12:09 pm (UTC)To my ear it sounds like not (ie. it sounds like the click sound interrupts the word rather than being part of it), but I don't suppose it's necessarily like that to a native speaker.
(Also of course there are dozens of different languages that use clicks: it's almost certainly folly to generalize about them!)