A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. You might have learned it as a chant, a song, or a simple declaration, but this is how you learned the vowels of English. You may have wondered, why is Y so unsure ...

The great vowel shift did not involve the shortening or the forward movement of vowels, as Michael Erard says (29 March, p 28). Only the long vowels shifted – upwards – or became diphthongs ...

They are consonant+vowel combinations 'wuh' and 'yu.' A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is not a bad rule of thumb. Most of the time a spoken vowel will be represented by one of those written forms.

Depending on the dialect, and including diphthongs, which are combinations of two vowel sounds, English has from nine to 16 vowel sounds. 2. THE MOST COMMON VOWEL IS SCHWA.

How many vowels does English have? Five, right? A, E, I, O, U. Oh, and sometimes Y. So, six? Actually, English has at least 14 different vowel sounds and, depending on the speaker and dialect ...

Most notably, you can see from the higher F2 that Mercury’s vowel is much more fronted and becomes increasingly so over the course of the vowel’s production. This points to a diphthong that was not ...

English bursts with consonants. We have words that string one after another, like angst, diphthong and catchphrase. But other languages keep more vowels and open sounds. And that variability might ...