Words without vowels

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In non-rhotic English dialects, such as Received Pronunciation, every lexical word must contain at least one spoken vowel in its pronunciation. In rhotic dialects, such as General American, a word may contain no other vowel sounds if it instead has an R sound, as in word.

However, there are many words that do not contain a vowel letter (defined as A, E, I, O, U) in their written form. In most of these, such as try, the letter Y stands for a vowel sound. (Abbreviations such as km are of course not considered words in their own right.)

There are also some truly vowelless interjections and onomatopoeia which do not contain R.

Contents 1 Words without vowel letters 2 Words without vowel sounds 3 Other languages 4 References

[edit] Words without vowel letters

A large number of Modern English words spell the IPA: /ɪ/ or /aɪ/ sound with the letter Y, such as by, cry, sky, why, wry, gym, crypt, hymn, lynx, myth, glyph, tryst, nymph, Gypsy, pygmy, flyby, and syzygy. The longest such word in common use is rhythms, and the longest such word in Modern English is the obsolete 17th-century word symphysy. (If archaic words and spellings are considered, there are many more, the longest perhaps being twyndyllyngs, the plural of twyndyllyng.)

In the computer game The 7th Guest, one of the puzzles involves a vowelless sentence,

Shy gypsy slyly spryly tryst by my crypt.

Similarly, the letter w stands for a vowel sound (/u/) in Welsh words, and two of these have entered Modern English:

• The crwth (pronounced /ˈkrʊθ/ or /ˈkruːθ/ and also spelled cruth) is a Welsh musical instrument similar to the violin:

He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn.^[1]

• A cwm (pronounced /ˈkuːm/) is a deep hollow within a mountain, usually with steep edges, such as the Western Cwm of Mount Everest. However, it is nearly always spelled combe (as in Ilfracombe and Castle Combe), coomb (as in J. R. R. Tolkien) or comb (as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson).

A non-Welsh word with w is pwn, pronounced /(p)oʊn/, a slang internet gaming term which originated as a typo of own.

There is also the mathematical expression n^th (pronounced enth), as in delighted to the nth degree, which has entered common usage.

Many acronyms contain no vowels, such as MC and DJ (also spelled emcee and deejay) for Master of Ceremonies and disc jockey.

[edit] Words without vowel sounds

Rhotic dialects, such as in the United States and Canada, have many words such as bird, learn, girl, church, worst, which some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant, [ɹ̩]. However, others analyze these words instead as having a rhotic vowel, [ɝ]. The difference may be partially one of dialect.

There are a few such words which are disyllabic, like cursor, curtain, and tercel: [ˈkɹ̩sɹ̩], [ˈkɹ̩tn̩] and [ˈtɹ̩sl̩] (or [ˈkɝsɚ], [ˈkɝtən], and [ˈtɝsəl]). The word myrrh, perhaps uniquely in the English language, contains neither a vowel letter nor a vowel sound in these dialects: [ˈmɹ̩] (or [ˈmɝ]).

The word and frequently contracts to a simple nasal consonant ’n, as in lock 'n key [ˌlɒk ŋ ˈkiː]. Words such as will, have, and is regularly contract to ’ll [l], ’ve [v], and ’s [z]. However, none of them are pronounced alone without vowels.

Onomatopoeic words that can be pronounced alone, and which have no vowels or Rs, include hmm, pht!, pst!, shh!, tsk!, and zzz.

[edit] Other languages

There are languages that form lexical words without any vowel sounds. The best known are probably the Slavic languages. In Croatian, for example, the consonants [r] and [rː] (the difference is not written) can act as a syllable nucleus and carry rising or falling tone; examples include the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda and geographic names such as Krk. In Czech, either [l] or [r] can stand in for vowels: vlk [vl̩k] "wolf", krk [kr̩k] "neck". A particularly long word without vowels is čtvrthrst, meaning "quarter-handful", with two syllables (one for each R). Whole sentences can be made from such words, such as Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick a finger through your neck" (follow the link for a sound file), and Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh "A morel full of spots wetted from fogs". (Here zvlhl has two syllables based on L; note that the preposition z consists of a single consonant. Only prepositions do this in Czech, and they normally link phonetically to the following noun, so the don't really behave as vowelless words.) In Russian, there are also prepositions that consist of a single consonant letter, like k "to", v "in", and s "with". As in Czech, and English ’ll, ’ve, ’s, etc., they don't normally occur alone.

So far, all of these syllabic consonants, at least in the lexical words, have been sonorants, such as [r], [l], [m], and [n], which have a voicing quality similar to vowels. However, there are languages with words that not only contain no vowels, but contain no sonorants at all, like shh! in English. These include Lolo, a few dialects of Berber, some of the northwestern Bantu languages, and some languages of the American Pacific Northwest, such as Nuxálk. An example from the latter is sxs "seal fat" (pronounced [sxs], just as it's spelled), and a longer one is xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ (pronounced [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰʦʼ]) "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". (Follow the Nuxálk link for other examples.) Such words cannot be said very loud, as the human voice can only be loud when pronouncing sonorants.

In Mandarin Chinese, words and syllables such as sī and zhī are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives and affricates phonemically, /ś/ and /tʂ́/, but phonetically they contain a sonorant segment that carries the tone.

[edit] References