However, as Old English speakers were conquered, first by the Vikings and other Scandinavian groups who spoke Old Norse, then by the Normans, who spoke Norman French, the English language began to incorporate a wide array of new vowel sounds that could not all be accounted for by just five letters. There were the short vowels – a, e, i, o, u – and the long vowels, which were pronounced the same but were longer in duration – ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. In Latin, each vowel did represent just one sound. Since the ninth century, English has used the Roman alphabet, which was originally used for Latin.
How did this happen? Why doesn’t English use the sensible one letter one sound approach of Spanish or Finnish? For starters, we simply don’t have enough letters to represent all the different sounds we use. In fact, that vowel sound, which corresponds to a lower-case u in the international phonetic alphabet, can be represented in English using fourteen different combinations of vowel letters. For example, think of the words ‘true,’ ‘few, ‘sioux,’ and ‘two.’ All of them contain the same vowel sound, and yet that sound is represented by a different letter or combination of letters in each word. If you try this experiment with the other vowel letters, you begin to realize that all of them can represent many different sounds, and often there is no system to the sounds that one letter does or doesn’t represent. Now compare these ‘a’ sounds to the ‘a’ in the word ‘prawn.’ That’s another sound, again being represented by the same letter. The ‘a’ at the end of the word sugar sounds more like the ‘e’ sound in ‘banker,’ or ‘water.’ Here, we have two different sounds being represented by just one letter. Think about the ‘a’ at the beginning of the word ‘apple,’ and the ‘a’ at the end of the word ‘sugar.’ Are they the same sound? No. And in English, most of the time, that correspondence is rather messy.
While it’s true that those letters are often used to represent vowels, the vowels are the sounds that correspond to those letters, not the other way around. This is the most crucial rule for breaking away from that list of five letters and a sixth ‘sometimes’ letter that most of us have used to conceptualize the vowels throughout our lifetimes. Rule number 1: A vowel is not a letter – it is a sound
Before we can talk about quantifying vowels, we need to discuss what exactly a vowel is and what it is not. Can you name the English vowels? If you rolled your eyes and answered A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y, you’re on the right track, but you’re still missing nine out of fourteen correct answers, including epsilon, open o, ash, and the schwa.
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