"oaie"

Translation: sheep

[IVIatjam]

Wow! I finally found a word with no consonants!

[Verbum_Facere]

You can even make an entire sentence with only vowels, using that word!

Oaia aia e a ei; eu i-o iau. "That sheep is hers; I am taking it from her". :D

[coto.i]

Ia-i-o! (Take it from her!) :)

[ProDuoExtra]

..and the plural of oaie is oi :)

[NellyLusch]

For the advanced french speakers: remember "ouailles", the veeeery old french term for sheep (now used for the people a priest preaches to).

[ID-007]

Interesting observation. Apparently, both ”oaie” and ”ouaille” come from the latin ”ovis.” How the French arrived at ”brebis (latin)/mouton (gaulish)” and the Italians to ”pecora” would be interesting stories. NOTE: Besides Romanian, the Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese stayed close to Latin as well.

[nahuatl1939]

regarding Italian "pecora" the origin is LATIN ' Pecus( nominative), pecoris (genitive). Pecus means Ganado in Spanish which in English is "cattle". The Latin word has given birth to French " pécuniaire" , Spanish "pecuniario", meaning " money" because at the beginning of the Roman Republic, the money was " pecus" i.e. cattle.

[ID-007]

Thank you for following up on this! To close the loop, it turns out that the French brebis seems to derive from the Latin berbēx from which the Romanian berbec = ram is derived!

[nahuatl1939]

Thanks. I did not look at that.

[deactivated user]

Next time I play Scrabble, I’m playing this! “That’s not a word!” “Yes it is.” “In what language?” “Romanian. It means ‘sheep’.” “Get lost! We’re playing in English!” I can try. :)

[CarolynHan11]

So all this talk about vowels got me thinking in English a "y" can be considered a vowel or a consonant. When we learned our vowels in school it was "a,e,i,o,u, and sometimes y" so I'm wondering does this happen in other languages where one letter is both a vowel and a consonant?

[EmmaMitche89062]

I don't know, but in Welsh "y" is a vowel.

[Estel785882]

In Welsh "w" can be either a vowel or a consonant.

[2hMcrGBy]

Cognates with English "ewe", makes a lot of sense to me!

[8jEZuexx]

Using y as a consonant in English, there are two six letter words that have no vowels : rhythm and syzygy. The latter is an astronomical term.

[couvertrash]

WHY