Re: The Name of the U
Saul Epstein 
Sun, 11 Jan 1998 15:19:38 -0600

From: Rob Zook <rzook*informix,com>
Date: Sunday, January 11, 1998 1:45 PM
 
> At 11:46 AM 1/11/98 -0600, Saul Epstein wrote:
>
> >They are [ey], [iy], [ay], [ow], and [yuw], all the
> >most proper pronunciations of the "long" forms which the letters
> >represent. A as in "pay," E as in "penal," I as in "pie," O as in
> >"pony," and U as in "punitive," and "amputate," and "miniscule,"
and
> >"cute," and "refute," and -- if you're really, really British --
> >"tune," and "dune," and even "Kuwait."
> 
> Now, keep in mind I was using your version of the Vulcan phonetic
> symbols (and phonemic too at this point).

All right. Here are the names of the English vowel letters, as
pronounced in English, transcribed, pretty closely, in my Vulcan
transcription, with vowels instead of approximants where appropriate.

A	eeii
E	ii
I	aaii
O	oouu
U	yuu(w)

> Off the top of my head in that message I was
> presenting that glide between two vowels as [y]. Don't ask me
> why, it just sounded that way.

That confused me some. With a glide in there, you don't have a
diphthong anymore, you have two syllables.

> Then long A one says and pronounces as Ei, long E as i, long I
> as Ai, long O as ou, and long U as yu. They are as much "names"
> for the Vowels as pronounciations of the "long" forms.

That's been my point all along. Some pronunciation of the vowel,
considered standard, acts as its name.
 
> Now, I'll by the difference between the cessation of the vowel, and
a 
> plosive, so again while it's not neccessary to have names for the
> vowels then on that bases. Vulcan would be an extreme minority, for
> not having them. Since I have yet to encounter a language that does
> not have vowel names.

English, German, Russian, and all the Indic languages simply
pronounce the vowel for its name, except in cases where the vowel is
a variation of some other vowel, like German umlauts and Russian's "i
kratkiya" literally "short I." And I seem to recall knowing that in
Spanish, <y> is called "i griega" though I don't know what that
means. But I suspect that it's done similarly for nearly every
language that uses an alphabet with letters to represent vowels, with
the exception of Greek.

--
from Saul Epstein
liberty*uit,net
www,johnco,cc,ks,us/~sepstein
"Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi
suraketca'."
							-- K'dvarin Urswhl'at