• ASeriesOfPoorChoices
        62·
        2 years ago

        Scrabble’s acceptable words include non-English words and other BS. It’s about as far from a viable “word list” as you can get.

        it’s just a bunch of approved letter sequences.

        hell, there was Kiwi guy who won French Scrabble. Doesn’t speak or know any French, just memorised the book.

        • JingleBerries
          5·
          2 years ago

          The guy who won the French Scrabble World Championships as a non-french speaker was not an American. His name is Nigel Richards and he’s a New Zealander who now calls Malaysia his home.

          Entirely true that the Scrabble word list is just like a collection of valid trading cards, Nigel Richards just collected them all.

        • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          2 years ago

          True enough, they include what they do for good game play, but according to various definitions of ‘word’ I looked up, onomatopoeia like hmm and shh are words. Yeah there are champions in African countries that don’t speak any English but win comps in English as well, it impresses me what memory can do.

  • force
    367·
    2 years ago

    Spelling-wise? Depends on what you mean by “vowel” and “word” – vowel isn’t really a term for letters/spelling, it only really makes sense in a phonemic/phonetic context. So, phonetically? Yes – i.e. words that only have a rhotic in the nucleus like “curd” which is just [kɹ̩d] in many rhotic dialects like most American English, “and” is often pronounced [n̩], “can” can be [kn̩]~[kŋ̍], “full” can be pronounced [fʟ̩] in some dialects (includinɡ mine). You can also include paralinguistic words like “shh” [ʃ̩].

    • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      In these examples such as curd and full, isn’t shwa the vowel? You can’t actually not have a vowel if you pronounce it.

      • force
        1·
        2 years ago

        /ɚ/ in American (including Canadian) English as in “nurse”, “curd”, “certain”, is usually labelled a “rhotacized vowel” in a phonemic context but it’s more precisely described as an approximant (due to the fact that it has some constriction around the palato-velar area, uvula, glottis, molars, and/or labio-dental area, depending on which variety you speak). And as I said, “full” is pronounced with no vowel in certain varieties.

    • reddig33
      233·
      2 years ago

      Those aren’t really English “words” though. There’s some old welsh in there which actually used W as a double U. And then some onomatopoeia, which while defined in some dictionaries, aren’t really words anymore than abbreviations like CIA or FCC are words.

      • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        81·
        2 years ago

        According to the Cambridge English dictionary a word is simply “a single unit of language that has meaning and can be spoken or written”, so acronyms and onomatopoeia are words as much as any other apparently. Maybe they would consider an acronym multiple units of language bound together though so not itself a word.

          • JimmyChanga
            113·
            2 years ago

            Ah, when i went to school it was only A.e.i.o.u that were the vowels.

            • guy
              18·
              2 years ago

              Y is only sometimes a vowel: when it forms a vowel sound in a word.

              In the case of “dry, crypt and dryly”, we could perhaps spell them “drie, cript and drielee” if we wish to see where those more familiar vowel sounds exist in those words.

              • JimmyChanga
                11·
                2 years ago

                Yeah, I’ve been reading up on it since the previous commentator drew my attention to it. Odd the bits of eduction you miss in life.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      10·
      2 years ago

      A cwm (pronounced /ˈkuːm/) is used in English in a technical geographical or mountaineering context to mean a deep hollow in a mountainous area

      Uhuh…

  • Doctor xNo@r.nfEnglish
    12·
    2 years ago

    Fun fact: In Dutch ‘vowels’ is the same word as is used for ‘streetstones’ (klinkers), so if you ask this question in Dutch, the answer is ‘dirtroad’. 😅

    • retrolasered@lemmy.zipEnglish
      155·
      2 years ago

      rhythm.

      I think there might be a sometimes w clause too. But any w words I can think of have a y anyway

      • themeatbridge
        132·
        2 years ago

        W is a sometimes vowel in Welsh. There are a few Welsh words that are valid in Scrabble dictionaries, which is really the only metric that matters. There are also several onomatopoeias that are valid Scrabble words, like mmm or brr or tsktsks. That last one is the only 7 letter word with no vowels or sometimes vowels.

        • ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.works
          61·
          2 years ago

          I was just learning about this today in response to this post! I had no idea that the definition of a vowel is based on what sound you actually make, rather than it having anything to do with what you write.

          It’s kind of weird that it’s not taught that way in schools. Like, you’re just told a/e/I/o/u are the vowels and left to get on with it. Seems to me that could just be changed to “by the way it’s a/e/I/o/u/y/w, off you go”.

            • ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.works
              21·
              2 years ago

              I can only imagine they’re downvoting because they’ve had a better education than me, or paid more attention in class, or read the Wikipedia entry ten minutes before me.

                • ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.works
                  21·
                  2 years ago

                  Exactly! I mean, some people (looking at you downvoters) learnt that during their education. But I (we?) didn’t, and this has been a really interesting find for me.

                  I genuinely love learning about linguistic weirdness, I just don’t know a lot about it. Or have many occasions to learn.

          • lad@programming.dev
            2·
            2 years ago

            I was once told on one croud-knowledge site that in English letters don’t imply sounds and there is no such thing as “this letter sounds like that in this word”

            Makes me wonder what they would’ve told me about this “sometimes Y” rule that is exactly based on letter-sound correspondence

            • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
              21·
              2 years ago

              Back in my day, we didn’t even have “and sometimes Y”.

              • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
                11·
                2 years ago

                I’m not sure if I’m older or younger than you so IDK if it’s trending better or worse. I’m late 30s, for reference. Also Canadian since that probably makes a difference.

                • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  I’m a little younger than you. I live in the US, but I was homeschooled in my early school years, so it’s possible the curriculum my mom used simply didn’t teach it. Or maybe I’ve simply forgotten they taught it.

      • foggianism
        12·
        2 years ago

        Well in my native langugage “r” sometimes acts as a vovel, but it’s never considered one. We have words like: smrt, tvrd, prst, krt, vrt, brk…