On Sat, 25 Oct 2014 08:12:01 -0700, Ken Blake, MVP wrote:

On Sat, 25 Oct 2014 09:46:11 +0100, Bob Henson
wrote:

On 24/10/2014 9:13 PM, Ken Blake, MVP wrote:

But if you include "y" as a semi-vowel, you should also include "w."
So it should be "facetiouslwy," but as far as I know. there's no such
word. g


There probably is in Welsh - it's a strange language produced largely by
taking the vowels out of English words and replacing them with "Y"s. :-)
My favourite place name in Wales is Ynysybyl - where all four "y"s are
pronounced differentlwy. Something like "Unissable.

As I said earlier, the word "vowel" really refers to a sound, not a
letter.

And as I said a bit after that, my dictionary disagrees with you. As do
I.

So Welsh doesn't take out vowels, it just sometimes uses
different letters to represent them. Yes, "y" is common, but so is
"w." My favorite word is "crwth," pronounced "crooth." And by the way,
our name for that letter--double-you--more accurately describes its
sound in Welsh than in English.

Of course many languages use glyphs other than English letters to
represent them; a few examples are Russian, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew.
So Welsh really isn't strange or unusual in that regard. As far as I'm
concerned, what's strange about Welsh is that it uses the same letters
we do, but some of them are pronounced very differently.

Many languages use the same alphabet (or at least the same letters) we
do to represent different sounds than we do. At least some letters,
sometimes many, represent different sounds than the English letters,
including sounds not found in English (even ignoring the added
diacritics)...

Just a few examples: junta or zarzuela in (Castilian) Spanish, peur in
French, Somogy and csardas in Hungarian (both a's have long marks, which
look like French acute accents).

The Spanish 'j', the French 'eu', and the Hungarian 'gy' represent
non-English sounds.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)