Vowel. When a person says “ah” for the doctor, an open sound is made with free passage of breath. This sound is a vowel, as are all the other open and freely breathed sounds in speech. In English, the vowel sounds are represented by the letters, a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w and y (as in now, city). But each letter stands for several sounds. The open quality of vowels distinguishes them from consonants. Consonants are formed with the organs of speech more or less closed. A vowel may be a syllable in itself, or it may be joined with one or more consonants to produce a syllable.
The way a vowel sounds in English is not always consistent with the way it is written. This inconsistency was caused in large part by the Great English Vowel Shift, a major change in English-language pronunciation that took place mainly in the 1400’s and 1500’s. For example, prior to the Great Vowel Shift, the letter e was pronounced with the sound it has today in ballet. After the shift, the “long” pronunciation of e was as in beet, and its “short” pronunciation was as in bet. The other English vowels underwent similar changes in pronunciation. Scholars do not know why this change occurred. It coincided with the period when the first English books were being printed, however, and the spellings that became standard in printed English represented the pronunciations that vowels had before the shift.
See also Consonant ; Pronunciation .
