Why is the letter y sometimes treated as a vowel and other times treated as a consonant?
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A “y” is substituted as a vowel when a regular vowel is otherwise unavailable. Example: “My”. Since there are no other vowels available, you substitute it as a vowel.
A long time ago, the Greek letter upsilon, which looks like “Y” and has a vowel sound, got added by the Romans to the latin alphabet, which became part of English. So that’s how the vowel form arose.
Later, old english had the letter yogh, which looks a little bit like a “y” and has the consonant y sound (kinda). But as the years went by, and old english turned into middle english, people started using the “y” symbol in place of the yogh symbol, and eventually that became permanent. So then the “y” symbol had two purposes: a vowel sound and a consonant sound.
The word “vowel” doesn’t describe letters or other symbols, strictly speaking. It describes sounds, and the letter *y* happens to represent several sounds. The symbols *a*, *e*, *i*, *o*, and *u* do too, but all the sounds they represent by themselves are vowel sounds.
To be more specific, a vowel is a sound that is made without constricting air movement from your lungs. Try making the sound *ee* as in *beet* or the sound *oo* as in *oodles* and you’ll notice there’s no places where you feel significant air pressure in your throat, mouth, or nose. But then try making the *t* sound in *bat* or the *sh* sound in *shock* and you’ll feel pressure.
*Y* can represent the sound /j/ as in *year* (which constricts airflow and is therefore a consonant), but it can also represent sounds like /i/ in *city* (which don’t constrict airflow and are vowels).
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