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Know Your English (Oct 2001)-17

Know your English

In English are there words without vowels?


Are you talking about the letters of the alphabet or are you talking about sounds? Every English word, in fact, every syllable of every English word usually contains a vowel sound. It is possible to have a syllable/word without a consonant sound (I, eye) but you will not find a syllable without a vowel sound.

Source:
The Hindu daily, Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Words without vowel letters

A large number of Modern English words spell the /ɪ/ or /aɪ/ sound with the letter Y, such as try, cry, fly, fry, sky, why, gym, hymn, lynx, myth, myrrh, pygmy, flyby, rhythm, and syzygy. The longest such word in common use is rhythms, and the longest such word in Modern English is the obsolete 17th-century word symphysy. (If archaic words and spellings are considered, there are many more, the longest perhaps being twyndyllyngs, the plural of twyndyllyng.)

Similarly, the letter w stands for a vowel sound (/u/) in Welsh words, and two of these have entered Modern English:

  • The crwth (pronounced /ˈkrʊθ/ or /ˈkruːθ/ and also spelled cruth) is a Welsh musical instrument similar to the violin:
He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn.[1]
  • A cwm (pronounced /ˈkuːm/) is a deep hollow within a mountain, usually with steep edges, such as the Western Cwm of Mount Everest. However, it is, in literary English, nearly always spelled combe (as in Ilfracombe and Castle Combe), coomb (as in J. R. R. Tolkien) or comb (as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson).

The internet term pwn arose as a misspelling of the word "own", due to the "o" and "p" keys being next to each other on the keyboard, and is now a commonly used word around the internet.

There is also the mathematical expression nth (pronounced /ˈɛnθ/), as in delighted to the nth degree, which has entered common usage. Besides this there are proper names, such as Kym Ng and the band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The poem "And Sometimes" by Christian Bök contains no vowel letters.

Courtesy:

wikipedia

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