the letter Y

is it a vowel or not

Officially it is a semi-vowel. It is a consonant in the word YES and a vowel in the word SCYTHE.

The letter Y is neither a vowel or a consonant.
Only sounds can be vowels or consonants. The letter Y is a graphical symbol, not a sound.

Well spotted.

I mean semi-consonant.

The letter Y IS a sound. You can hear it when you say "yes" or "scurry". At the end of a word it sounds like a letter E.

At school we called it a part-time vowel.

Y is a consonant in the word YES?

Yes. Why?

I didn't know it, I thought it was vowel.

It began life as representing the sound of the Greek letter Upsilon for representing words borrowed from Greek (featuring upsilon) in Latin. In most of the Latin/Romance languages it now seems to just be the same as "i" and in French is even known as a "Greek i". In English the letter "y" has various roles:

- consonant in YOU, YES etc.
- vowel like the "i" in kiss in "Styx"
- diphthong like the "ie" in pie in "try"
- diphthong element equal to i, for example AY, EY, OY. Usually in final position because English doesn't like ending words with an I.

Thank you, Simon! You are quite right, in French Y is the same as I, it is a vowel: that is why I was a bit surprising!

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The letter Y IS a sound. You can hear it when you say "yes" or "scurry". At the end of a word it sounds like a letter E.
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Sorry, I disagree. You CAN'T hear a typographical symbol. When you say "yes" or "scurry", you produce SOUNDS, not LETTERS. Namely, when you say "yes", you produce the sound denoted as [j]. When you say "scurry", you produce the sound denoted as [i(:)].

If you say that Y is a semi-vowel, then E is a semi-vowel, too. In "pew", there is a [j] sound after [p]. [j] is a consonant, therefore E can't be a "full-time vowel".

Similarly, I think G should be called a "semi-letter", since it is not pronounced at all in words like "eight".

Really, it doesn't make any sense to attempt to classify TYPOGRAPHICAL SYMBOLS as vowels or consonants.

Tom*:
In English, the "Y" does not sound like J in "yes". English does not have a silent "J" like spanish, so it doesn't represent that letter. Therefore in words like "Yes", it has it's own sound. It is the "Ya" sound. We are taught in school the vowels are A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

Please forget what you've been taught in school unless one of your classes was lingustics. Tom's correct, "y" is a letter not a sound, vowels and consonants are sounds not letters. The letter "y" is not a vowel, consonant, semi-consonant, semi-vowel or part-time vowel; it's a letter.

As for the "j" thing, what he meant was the "y" sound in "yes" is the sound denoted as [j] in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The IPA, like German, uses this letter for this consonant it doesn't have anything to do with the "j" in Spanish.

The distinction between vowels and consonants isn't as clear-cut and black and white as you might think. There is some fuzzyness around the boundry it's a bit like the distinction between metals and non-metals. Just as you have semi-metals you can also have semi-vowels. A semi-metal, like carbon, is a non-metal with some metalic characteristics. Similarly, what a semi-vowel is is a consonant which is close being a vowel.

The sounds of "y" in "yet" and "w" in "wet" are semi-vowels. Although they are consonants they are vowel-like. This has nothing to do with the fact that the letters "y" and "w" represent vowels in some words. The sounds of "y" in "cry" and "w" in "cwm" are vowels not semi-vowels.

I've never heard the terms "semi-consonant" or "part-time vowel" but I'd avoid them because if they are not simply wrong, I think they'd be misleading.

... "lingustics" ... you can see I've forgotten what I'd learnt at school ... "linguistics"