My wife and I were talking about vowels the other day. A, E, I, O, U. And sometimes Y. Sometimes? That’s too vague. Let’s come up with a percentage of how often Y is a vowel. C’mon! We have the technology. Doing this would assist those trying to learn our difficult English language. I’m guessing that with all the adverbs we have Y is usually a vowel. But I've never seen verification.
Wouldn’t it be easier to teach students new to the language that the vowels are A, E, I, O, U and 81% of the time Y (or whatever we determine the percentage to be)? The other 19% of the words (where Y is a consonant) could be handled as one off exceptions.
The word “yield”, for example, could be taught in driver’s ed in the roundabout chapter.