Pluto Is Not a Planet, Europe Is Not a Continent, but Y Is Certainly a Vowel . . . Sometimes

Jeffrey Kluger's essay in this week's Time agrees that Pluto is not a planet and explains how our culture has mislabeled and miscatagorized several other things. Kluger rightly contends that Europe, which shares a continental plate with Asia and is in no way set apart as a separate land mass, is by no means a continent and should not be considered one. He also reminds Americans that we have misnumbered our presidents by counting Grover Cleveland twice. Sure, Grover served nonconsecutive terms, but no other two-term president is counted twice. The United States has had forty-two presidents, not forty-three.

Excellent work, Jeffrey. But I have to disagree with Kluger's treatment of the letter Y:

Y: a vowel? Please. Y gets plenty of work as a consonant without having to moonlight in a job it wasn't designed for. Someone needs to show some guts and either change the spelling of problem words (what's wrong with fli, cri, cript?) or relax the rule about every word having to have at least one vowel in it. Either way is fine, but the whole "sometimes y" thing has always smelled like a dodge.

It may smell like a dodge, but "sometimes Y" is absolutely correct. Whether a letter is a consonant or a vowel depends entirely on how it functions in a given word. In rhythm and spunky, Y is a vowel; in young and yam, Y is a consonant. Actually, if you pay attention to all of the Ys you see as you go about your day, I think you'll find that Y is more commonly used as a vowel than as a consonant. Sure, one could point out that almost anytime Y is used as a vowel it could be replaced with an I; but one could also point out that QU could almost always be replaced by KW, that X could almost always be replaced by KS, and that /sh/, /th/, and /ch/ are distinct sounds that deserve their own letters.

Our alphabet is loaded with flaws; that doesn't mean that Y isn't sometimes a vowel. For that matter, I would argue that W occasionally functions as a vowel. Consider words such as "cow" and "sew"—the consonant /w/ is not pronounced and the vowel sounds made by OW and EW are distinct from those made by a lone O or E. I would also argue that some vowels occasionally function as consonants: I in "onion" makes a consonant /y/ sound; U in "suite" makes a consonant /w/ sound.

The point is this: Letters have different functions in different contexts and therefore cannot be catagorized according to simple criteria. Thus we must hold on to the "sometimes Y."