From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 Discussion copied from Talk:Three-letter vowel-less English word 2 Cwm, nth 3 Commonly used vowelless word 4 Twyndyllyngs 5 Pwn 6 Discussion native to this page 6.1 Y is a vowel 6.2 hymn and myth 6.3 Additions 6.4 Sources? 6.5 Tsk 6.6 PWN. 6.7 PILLOW ?? 6.8 Two things 6.9 Merger proposal 6.10 Rhotic vs. nonrhotic

[edit] Discussion copied from Talk:Three-letter vowel-less English word

[edit] Cwm, nth

I thought cwm was Welsh -- Tarquin 21:07 Mar 28, 2003 (UTC)

"Cwm" is a Welsh word. I've taken it out. The English people I know can't even say it. Sorry and all that. Deb 11:25 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

English has many words that were borrowed from other languages without changing the spelling. If you remove it from this article, you'll also have to remove it from the article on pangrams in which it is useful in forming two of the sentences. According to List of strange words in the English language, it is pronounced "koom" (easy enough for me to say it). GUllman 18:06 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

But how many of those pangrams actually make any sense to the average English speaker? Have you ever heard an English speaker use the word "cwm"? I doubt it. And how do you pronounce "koom"? Do you pronounce the "oo" as in "zoom" or as in "book"? (I'm not telling you which is correct.) Deb 18:14 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Cwm is certainly an English word now taken from Welsh. It is not however a vowelless word. It is also not apparently the only word using w as a vowel in English http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/v/vowelless.html

Rmhermen 18:30 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Have you ever heard anyone use the word "vowelless"? (Unless you were in a discussion with other students in an English class.) Only a few thousand of the words in a dictionary are in common use; the rest are more technical and used only by certain people in certain situations. For example, only a person in the mathematics field would have a habit of using the word "nth" in conversation. GUllman 21:15 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Not true. I hear people in the UK use the word "nth" all the time. Deb 20:55 Apr 2, 2003 (UTC)

Seconded. People often say "to the nth degree" for example. -- Tarquin 20:58 Apr 2, 2003 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that "nth" is a word any more than "45_th" or "21_st" are words. They are numbers with suffixes. Similarly, "Five thousand, four hundred, seventy nine" isn't a word either. It's merely a string of words. "N" is a mathematical idea or a variable. To refer to the "nth" something is to suffix 'th' or 'st' onto a verbalized variable name which isn't a word to begin with.

"To the nth degree" is a common phrase. Kingturtle 06:29, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Commonly used vowelless word

I added the longest commonly used vowelless word to the article (it's rhythms). I wrote commonly used in place of what I actually meant, which is recognizable. You'd have a hard time finding someone who knew what a symphysy is, but just about everyone knows what rhythms are, without having to ever use it in their lifetime. However, describing it as the longest recognizable word in the article seems wrong. If anyone can think of a better way of putting it, feel free to change it. JeffyP 15:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Twyndyllyngs

Twyndyllyngs was added as the longest word without a traditional vowel. See Longest_word_in_English JeffyP 15:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

This word doesn't appear to be in the OED. While I'm aware this doesn't exclude it from being an English word, it means that a definition here would be useful. Perhaps you can do the Wiktionary page at the same time? Twyndyllyngs Lukehounsome 09:54. 12 Sept 2006 (UTC)

If twyndyllyngs is removed, we should probably restore the sentence that it replaced:

The longest English word that does not contain any of the five traditional vowels is probably the eight-letter symphysy, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means "Union or fusion of two bodies or parts of a body".

—Bkell (talk) 04:29, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pwn

Pwn. That is all. --Ihope127 13:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

While correcting typos & filling in missing words in pwn section, I checked to see if the word actually exists or if this is vandalism. It exists in an online slang dictionary, which itself could have been vandalized. Because of that possibility, I did some further checking with offline resources and yes, it's a slang neologism commonly used by online multiplayer environment gamers. -- Lisasmall 01:21, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion native to this page

[edit] Y is a vowel

Wow--pardon my saying, but this page is kind of terrible. There's not a shadow of a doubt that "y" is a vowel in crypt, syzygy, or lynx; the discussion of the latter word looks to me like it falls into the "patent nonsense" category. And how does "y as a consonant" run "counter to the system of English spelling"? I'd recommend this for deletion if I felt qualified to. --Tahnan, dropping by

Well ... "y as a consonant" does pretty much run counter to reality if you read it as meaning "y is never a vowel", which is what the sentence is saying, when taken in context. But the wording "counter to the system of English spelling" is a bit obtuse. And I have to agree that even mentioning y-only words on this page is rather silly, except possibly for a brief one-sentence dismissal. The lynx entry in particular seems completely fabricated -- at least it refers to nothing I've ever seen before. Breadbox 00:12, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Y and w are vowels when used as such. This includes when used in pairings such as -ay and -ow. - jc37 07:00, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] hymn and myth

yaaaaaaaaaa

[edit] Additions

I know "Be Bold" is the accepted policy here, but the xkcd article states that it "Could not easily be an English word". Does it belong here?

Could hymn go in?

[edit] Sources?

I haved flagged the article as unreferenced after looking through the history. - Tom Tolnam 00:20, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tsk

The entry for "tsk" claimed this this sound is also sometimes spelled as "tisk". This is not accurate. "Tisk" is a complete misunderstanding that people come to upon reading the word "tsk" in print and assuming that it is a word which is pronounced "tisk", instead of what it actually is, which is a sort of a clucking sound. So these people, after reading "tsk tsk" in print enough times, will then go about saying "tisk tisk", assuming they are pronouncing the words they have read. And then others, having heard people say, "tisk tisk", will at times write down "tisk tisk" in print. While this might be an interesting linguistic phenomenon, or the accidental creation of a new word "tisk", it is not part of the definition or "tsk" or an alternate spelling of it. --Xyzzyplugh 09:00, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PWN.

STOP USING PWN AS IT IS NOT A REAL WORD, IT IS INPROPER ENGLISH, STOP SUPPORTING IT WIKI, OR YOU WILL LOSE SOME VALUED USERS!

<humor>If you want to be a spelling advocate, then don't spell "improper" improperly! Otherwise, you might find yourself pwned.</humor> --NetRolller 3D 20:04, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PILLOW ??

How is "w" a consonant in pillow ? Its a silent one , if it is. More likely the "ow" together represent a vowell sound ( as in sow, mow, or now ( where it is a different vowell sound )) If you want an example of "w" as a consonant, there are plenty, but pillow is not one of them.

Cwm is not an english word. Its welsh. This word exists in english as combe or coombe and the welsh spelling is an affectation. Eregli bob 04:18, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Two things

Firstly, I find this hilarious:

"Rival etymologist factions have argued for centuries whether the letter "y" is a consonant or a vowel... The battle rages on today, as the consonant and vowel camps continue to fight for the ownership of the y in lynx."

This makes it sound like a war of some sort, rather than a linguistic debate.

Secondly, re: Pwn. OK, Mr Angry, all-Caps, unnamed leet-speak objector - what is it that makes something a 'real' word? If it is a word in fairly widespread use, surely that makes it a real one?

Besides which, pwn doesn't even appear in the article. WikiReaderer 20:13, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Added subheaders to the W header. Hopefully that will clear anything up. --DBishop¹⁹⁸⁴ 19:58, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merger proposal

Three-letter vowel-less English word should be merged into List of words without vowel letters. As indicated by its title, the first article was created by a user who believed there was only one such word. But over time, other such three-letter words were added (so at very least the title is inaccurate). Then some words of other lengths were added — all of which are already in the second article. Since it is not an article about a unique word but as become a list, the first article duplicates the second (and not even completely). — Michael J 12:31, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Merged. kwami (talk) 07:10, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

And rewrote, so I moved it to a more appropriate title. kwami (talk) 07:20, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rhotic vs. nonrhotic

I think the dichotomy drawn between rhotic and nonrhotic dialects of English in this article is not apropos. It's not the case that rhotic dialects allow vowelless words by using /r/ as a syllable nucleus; rather, in most rhotic dialects, the /r/ which is used as a syllable nucleus is in fact a vowel, namely this one: [ɚ]. AJD (talk) 23:29, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Evidently there are pure rhoticized vowels, and that may be the case for some people. For me, however, syllabic ar has the diphthongal quality of /uː/ or /iː/. For example girl is sesquisyllabic [ɡɹ̩əɫ], just as peel is sesquisyllabic [pʰiəɫ]. You could argue that there's a nuclear vowel in there, and that these words are phonemically /ɡʌrl/ and /pijl/, but there's definitely something consonantal as well. It isn't a pure vowel [ɝ]. kwami (talk) 04:31, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

You write [ɡɹ̩əɫ], indicating a syllabic [ɹ̩]—but syllabic [ɹ̩] is [ɝ]. That is, [ɹ] is a semivowel, and it bears the same relationship to [ɝ] as [w] does to [u] and [j] does to [i]. So, like /i:/, may glide slighltly in the direction of more constriction, but that's a far cry from saying there's no vowel at all. The syllabic-r of (rhotic American) English has the same distribution as any other long vowel, and it's produced with no friction or obstruction in the vocal tract, which is the very phonetic definition of a vowel. AJD (talk) 15:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

There's a difference between an approximant and a vowel. [ɹ̩] isn't [ɝ] anymore than [w̩] is [u]. We should say that some people consider the er in herd to be a rhotic vowel rather than a syllabic consonant, but not everyone accepts that analysis. If I were transcribing my pronunciation precisely, maybe [ɡɝɹɫ] or [ɡɝɹəɫ] would be better. kwami (talk) 21:04, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Reworded it a bit to try to cover both views. kwami (talk) 21:13, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there is a difference between an approximant and a vowel, really, apart from syllabic function—certainly a syllabic approximant is the same as a vowel. What could "syllabic w" be if not [u]? Bu anyhow, thanks for the rewrite. AJD (talk) 23:34, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

There's a difference in articulation between [ai̯] and [aj]. But you're right, it doesn't make much sense to speak of a syllabic w. kwami (talk) 23:56, 13 December 2007 (UTC)