have you ever noticed how in English, the y-sound can only occur after a consonant if it’s also before /u/? or a schwa that used to be a /u/.
like, the only time you get consonant-y-vowel is in words like pure, cure, mute, feud, beauty, etc. i know the historical reasons why those words are pronounced the way they are (it’s largely because of influence of early French on early English), but so where did the other sequences of consonant+y.... go? other languages can do that, and you get words like Spanish fiesta (which we borrowed as fee-esta by the way, not fyesta, because of this phenomenon), Korean hyeong, Japanese Kyōto, Old Norse Mjǫllnir, etc etc etc, you get the idea. we can have other vowels after y-sounds in words like “yes”, “yikes”, “yonder”, and “yam”, but English does not seem to allow other consonants to be placed at the beginning of those words. “myes”, “byikes”, “pyonder”, and “kyam” are not allowed.
now, those y-sounds in the those words in those other languages derive from different sources, and actually all of those words can be traced back etymologically to not having a y-sound in those spots. fiesta arises from Latin festa via Spanish’s breaking of stressed e and o into ie and ue respectively. hyeong and kyōto are Korean and Japanese borrowings of words from Middle Chinese, in this case MC hˠwiæŋ and kˠiæŋ(tuo) respectively, both of which have an i-sound sort of as a lead-in to the nucleus vowel, but aren’t strictly speaking reconstructed as having been y-sounds. and besides, reconstructions of Old Chinese apparently say that those two words originally had r-sounds in those places, and changes to consonant clusters and the vowel are what produced the y-like sounds which were in the words at the times they were borrowed into Korean and Japanese. Old Norse Mjǫllnir is apparently from Proto-Germanic meldunaz, so this is another instance of an e breaking into a y+vowel combination. the English words pure, cure, cube, etc get their y-sounds from early English speakers rendering the French u-sound into English, so the French u (which is pronounced like saying “eeeee” but with your lips rounded) was borrowed as “yu”, which is a close enough approximation.
so, i wonder why this is. y is a semivowel, a sound that is somewhere between consonant and vowel, and so is w. but, w actually does appear in a lot of root words in English, and didnt arise from changes to a vowel or consonant... it has always been in those positions for as far back in time as linguists can reconstruct. words like “two” (which isnt pronounced with a w now, but it used to be pronounced with a w and then a long o-sound, and the w still surfaces in related words like “twice” and “twenty”), “dwell”, “swing”, etc still have a consonant-w-vowel sequence that is thought to have been there in Proto-Indo-European too.
i imagine it’s because y-sounds are extremely prone to affecting sounds around them, so when they arise in a language, they may not last very long, though you’ll see traces of their presence afterwards. whether it involves palatalizing the preceding consonant, fronting the following vowel, or anything like that, they change the sounds around them and then just sometimes.... vanish. sometimes they change the sounds around them so much that including a y-sound there is sort of unnecessary afterwords, like if the sequence “kyeh” would have the k change to a ch-sound in front of the y and the short e (like in “beg”) change to a short i (like in “big”) because of the y right before it, the resulting word “chyih”... doesnt need the y-sound, right? isn’t that kind of hard to say? chyih? it would probably come out as “chih” much more naturally. alternatively, the reason w-sounds stick around longer (though they also often change and alter the sounds around them, and often disappear too, but seemingly a bit less commonly) might just be because rounding your lips is much more distinctive, and since it doesnt involve your tongue much at all, it’s less likely to completely alter the way a word is said the same way that y-sounds do. w’s are like instagram filters you can slap onto a word to color it sometimes lol.
hmm i dont really have a point to this, i’m just kinda.. observing. so um, i guess that’s the end of my infodump. thanks lol
