That our alphabet is composed of 26 letters you already know, don't you? Perhaps, what you don't know is that the letters K, W and Y were only considered letters of the Brazilian alphabet recently, as of the New Orthographic Agreement. Before, they were “intruders”, now they are officially a constituent part of our language.
These three little letters were part of our alphabet until the year 1943, when they were considered unnecessary. Its use was only allowed in foreign words and some abbreviations. This situation lasted until recently, when they were once again admitted to our alphabet, which until then had 23 representatives, including five vowels and eighteen consonants. With the return of K, W and Y, an interesting question arose: how would they be classified? What about its use? K, W and Y: vowels or consonants?
Well, of course the question aroused the interest of linguists, the language scientists. They thought a lot about the case and came to the conclusion that these letters should be used in special situations, and that its classification as a vowel, semivowel or consonant would be conditioned to the analysis of the phonemes they represent. check out:
→The letters K, W and Y: Should be used in anthroponyms, such as Joyce, Kleper, Conan Doyle, Kafka etc.
→ In toponyms (proper names of places) originating from other languages and their derivatives: Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Hawaii etc.;
→ In abbreviations, acronyms, symbols and in words adopted as measurement units of international circulation, such as the various symbols in the periodic table, K (potassium); Kg (kilogram), Km (kilometer), Kw (kilowatt), Khz (kilohertz) etc.;
→ In words derived from foreign proper names, such as Shakespearean, from Shakespeare, composer, of Comte, Garrettian, Garrett'sTaylorism, Taylor, Webernian, Weber, etc.;
→ The letter “K” represents the consonant /k/, as in Karina, Kant, kart,ketchup, kaiser etc;
→ The letter “W” can represent the vowel phoneme /u/, as in web and William, or consonant phoneme /w/, as in Wagner and walter etc. Thus, the “W” can be a vowel or a consonant, depending on the usage;
→ The classification of the letter “Y” demands further analysis from us, as its classification will depend on how it appears in the syllable. It will be a vowel when it is the base of the syllable, as in the word Chantilly; sit will be a semivowel when supported by a vowel, as in the word office boy. In other cases, the letter "Y" will be classified as a descending oral diphthong, as in words byte and solitary, because the “Y” grapheme will be pronounced like the phoneme /ai/.
To finish our study, it is important to emphasize that we wrongly associate the letters to a simplistic view that classifies them only as vowels, semivowels or consonants. The lyrics are, above all, the sound they represent, therefore, what counts is its phonetic analysis, and not the arbitrary division that was made by linguistic consensus.
By Luana Castro
Graduated in Letters
