Nincom's bunkum
Sir: Your ingenious colleague, Jaspistos, reveals himself in one respect a nincom- poop. 'And since y is a consonant...,' he wrote, instancing Dalrymple (Competition, 6 July). Vowels and consonants are, howev- er, sounds, not letters of the alphabet, the links between the two being contingent and, especially in English, often inconsis- tent. As for the letter y in particular, some- times this does indeed symbolise a conso- nant (as in yellow rind young), but some- times it interchanges with the letter i to symbolise a vowel or a diphthong (by, Dal- rymple, pretty, Yvonne).
By the same token, the six successive consonant-symbols in Knightsbridge indi- cate (mercifully) only four sounds, because the digraph gh represents a palatal spirant silenced some four centuries ago, and like- wise the six symbols in Hampsthwaite even supposing this to be in fact pro- nounced as written, not always the case with place-names — indicate only five sounds at most, in so far as th is here, as usual, a digraph representing the voiceless dental spirant.
Cecily Clark
13 Church Street, Chesterton, Cambridge
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