Why do we have vowels and consonants in different categories?

And sometimes Y.

Vowels can be held (you can say aaaaaaaa but not kkkkkkkkk), and can connect two sounds (you can say ‘cat’ but not ‘cjt’). That’s why there’s a vowel in every syllable.

If I recall correctly (and scanned webpages for a refresher correctly), vowels tend to be pronounced with a more open airway, and consonants tend to constrict the airway. There are some consonants that are somewhat edge-case, more like vowels (less constricted)—I believe /r/ and /l/ are some examples.

Ah @Mariah beat me to the punch line, vowels connect the consonant sounds.

To create subtle differences, such as the difference in “kit” and “kite.” That subtle difference can create a universe of different meaning in similar-sounding words. Which is kind of why humans, and their ability to talk (and finally, to spell,) makes us cooler than hell.

And now I am sitting at my desk trying to say “cjt” and “tck” and “stk” and “gd” and any other combination I can think of, hahaha… actually it almost works, but the “words” sound very strange and constricted, and of course my “kt” and my “kt” are indistinguishable

You talk funny @Soubresaut..

I view a vowel as being the ones that make the sound. Consonants just tell you where to place the things that help make the sound (such as your tongue, lips, throat, etc.)

Try yelling fffffffffff!!
Now try yelling eeeeeeeee!!

The first example, f, was a consonant. Not much noise, huh? The second example, e, was a vowel. You probably scared the person next door if you actually tried this.

I am not a linguist.

@Dtchss—wh’t y’ t’lk’ng ‘b’t!

There are two different reasons for the separation, one historical and the other scientific. As it turns out, the two reasons are also related. The historical reason for thinking about consonants separately from vowels is that the consonants came first when alphabetic writing was invented. The vowels were implied (or assumed to be known) in these early writing styles, and so their symbols were created later.

The scientific reason is that vowels are vocalized differently than consonants. There are many ways of characterizing the difference, some of which are more precise than others. But my preferred way of explaining it is that it all has to do with the mouth’s involvement in forming the sound. Vowels involve only the shape of the mouth. Consonants all involve some sort of action from the tongue, teeth, lips, palate, and/or throat. Put another way, vowels all involve an open vocal tract, while consonants involve constricting or closing the vocal tract somewhere along the way to make the proper sound.

So how are the two explanations related? Well, it turns out that only a relatively small number of sounds can be made with an open vocal tract, which makes it less crucial to write them down. This made it attractive to leave them out back when writing newer, much more cost intensive, and far less easily replicable than it is now. Of course, writing remained somewhat cost intensive and difficult to replicate for quite some time, but nothing close to what it was like at the very beginning. So it took a few generations for vowels to become standard everywhere. But alphabets are still more efficient than logograms, so alphabets took over pretty quickly in most places.

ta nw @sbrst!

@RedDeerGuy1 This isn’t just an English deal. All languages have vowels and consonants, although they differ by language and also by sound.

(I am thinking of the Bushman clicking Ungwatsi language of the natives in “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”)

As mentioned above, there are different sets of vowels in various languages. My last, I believe, is Croatian in origin. The original Croatian spelling uses an “r” as a vowel in the first syllable. In the “Americanized” spelling (which is the form used by all the descendants of my grandfather)
the “r” sound is represented by “er”.

GREAT movie @zenvelo!

The original Phonecian alphabet did not include vowels. I don’t know if this is because their language did not distinguish words by vowel sounds or if they filled in the vowel sounds based on context. I did a Web search and found credit for the first vowel symbols given to the Greeks and the Hebrews.

This is how you pronounce a grammatical phone (yeah it’s called a phone).

The air goes from your lungs into the larynx. In the larynx, it meets vocal cords. From there, it goes to the mouth, and from there into outer space as a sound, or phone.

The phonetic air (the air used to make a phone) has two destinies:

1. It goes freely. There are no obstacles in the mouth. These phones are called vowels. The vowels differ only by the position of the tongue. Depending on how close the tongue is to the upper palate, you get high ( /i/ and /u/) or low ( /e/ and /o/). The vowel /a/ is neutral, which means the mouth and tongue do not move at all when pronouncing it.

2. It meets an obstacle. When it does, the phone is called a consonant. There are several ways of creating an obstacle. Consonants are classified by the place where the obstacle is formed.

There are some roles and differences phones have because of this.

1. Vowels always carry the intonation of the word (prosody deals with this). You can not have a word with stress on a consonant.

2. Vocals carry syllables, consonants don’t. There are phonetic groups with consonants only, but they are not syllables. Therefore, the number of syllables in a word is decided by counting the number of vowels. Also, a consonant cannot be pronounced without a vowel.

3. Vocals are always voiced. it means that, when creating a vowel, the vocal cords must be active. With consonants, though, the vocal cords play secondary role, classifying consonants into voiced (vocal cords activated) and voiceless (vocal cords inactive). Consonants even make minimal couples on this. It means that there are (almost) always two consonants that are pronounced the same, but one is voiced and the other one is voiceless.

4. There is no word without a vowel. Sometimes, when there is no vowel, a consonant may take a role of one. This is because the vowel carries the intonation and you can’t have a word without it (unless it’s a clitic, but clitics don’t stand alone anyways. Prosody deals with this). In Slavic languages, for example, /r/ and /l/can take a role of a vowel and carry the intonation.

I will give you some links to read about it further:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics)

I hope I helped. Peace!

To complicate things more, there is classes of phonemes known as “approximants” and “semi-vowels” which might include certain iterations represented by letters such as “r” and “w”.