Most English speakers know the vowels as “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y”. The reason for y’s ambivalent status is because it is often used as a consonant, as in “yes”, “you”, “kayak”, and “player”. It can also be used as a vowel, as in “sky”, “psychology”, “byte”, and “city”.

Less often considered is the similar use of the letter i. Indeed, i and y are historically related; in French y is called “i grec” or “Greek i”.

We are most used to thinking of i as a vowel, but it functions in much the same way as y. It’s a vowel in “kit”, “ceiling”, “neighbor”, and “time”. It acts as a consonant in “Gaia”, “paranoia”, “glacier” (depending on regional pronunciation), “Serbia”, the name “Iago”, “onion”, “familiar”, “uranium”, and the second i in “India”.

In phonetics, this sound is called a voiced palatal glide or a palatal approximant and is represented as /j/. As the symbol suggests, the latin letter j is also sometimes used to represent this consonant sound, though less often in English. We see this in other languages such as German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and more.

In general, vowel and consonant sounds are much more complicated than vowel and consonant letters. There are other cases where consonant sounds are introduced where there are only vowels. For example, the “uu” in “continuum” sounds like “you-wuh” the with the /j/ and /w/ sounds. Consonant sounds are also frequently inserted between a word ending in a vowel and a word beginning with one, like in “the end”. Depending on emphasis and dialect the consonant between the two vowels can vary, either “the yend” or “the ‘end” where ‘ represents a glottal stop. This is a sound that occurs in English but no letter represents it. You could think of it as the sound the dash makes in “uh-oh”. In phonetics, it’s represented by /ʔ/. A glottal stop can also occur at the beginning of any word that starts with a vowel if that word is the first in a sentence, or for emphasis.

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^{Featured image by Josh Sorenson}