Pronunciation of letter y: asylum vs syrup

Solution 1:

No.

There are no rules for how to pronounce the letter Y -- or rather there are too many rules, and none of them work. Similarly, there are also no good rules for how to pronounce any other letter of the English alphabet. Modern English spelling does NOT represent pronunciation in Modern English.

Rather, it represents one spelling (there were many) for Middle English pronunciation, which got fixed when printing became established in England, right before the end of the Great Vowel Shift. Spelling used to be free, like handwriting is now; but printing froze it, a little too soon to get a good spelling for Modern English. Too bad, but we're stuck with it now.

Solution 2:

The "other stackexchange post" is wrong on two counts.

First, as you point out, there are plenty of words of Greek origin where it is pronounced /aɪ/, such as most words containing "phyto-".

Secondly, there are plenty of words of Greek origin where it is pronounced /ɪ/ (like "pin"), for example in "syzygy", where for me the first two vowels both rhyme with "sit" (though I think for some the second "y" is /ə/).

Solution 3:

The vowel y has three predominant sounds, and they mimic the long and short sounds of the vowel i, and the long sound of the vowel e.

Examples of the long i sound: cry, sty, dye, type, pylon, hyphen, cycle, hyperbole, xylophone.

Examples of the short i sound: gym, hymn, cynic, lynx, crystal, typical, syllable, homonym.

When the y is pronounced with the long e sound, you typically find that at the end of a word, or the end of a prefix to a word.

Examples of the long e sound: happy, bevy, candy, dizzy, polygraph, and almost any word ending with the suffix -ly.

John is correct when he says that the pronunciation rules are too complex to summarize easily. One good example is the word cycle, which has the long i sound – but, for some reason, after adding a prefix (i.e., bicycle, tricycle) the y is typically pronounced with the short i sound!

And Malvolio's point is well-taken, too. I'm classifying these according to what you'd find in the pronunciation guide of a dictionary. What you'd actually hear might vary according to regional and local accents. Remember:

"There is no 'correct' pronunciation of anything." (Barrie England)

Solution 4:

There's no simple rule. In general, when "y" represents a vowel, it is pronounced just the same as the letter "i" would be.

The issue is that "i" has multiple pronunciations. It can be pronounced variously as

• /aɪ/ ("long i")
• /ɪ/ ("short i")
• an unstressed, reduced vowel realized as /ɪ/ or /ə/, depending on one's accent (the vowel in the second syllable of "rabbit")
• an unstressed vowel realized as /ɪ/ or /iː/, depending on one's accent (the vowel in the second syllable of "happy")

Useful rules of thumb

There are some general rules you can use to try to predict the pronunciation from the spelling of a word, but there are often exceptions to these rules.

Here are some of the more useful and reliable ones:

With very few exceptions, "Y" (or "I") is pronounced as /ɪ/ ("short i") when it comes before any of the following:

• a consonant or consonant cluster that is followed immediately by the end of the word (e.g. "cyst", "myth")
• a doubled consonant letter (e.g. "abyssal")
• any consonant cluster that could not be pronounced at the start of an English word (e.g. "gypsum"; no English word starts with the /ps/ sound sequence found in this word)
• a consonant cluster starting with the letter "s" (e.g. "crystal")
• a single consonant followed by "i" and another vowel letter (e.g. "myriad", "Syria")

When "Y" comes before a single consonant (or a consonant cluster that can occur at the start of a word) followed by a vowel letter, it might be pronounced as /aɪ/ ("long i"). However, /ɪ/ ("short i") is also an option here. There are some patterns to which one is used, but they are somewhat complicated and a number of exceptions to them exist, so I won't mention them here. Some of them are mentioned in the following Wikipedia article: Traditional English pronunciation of Latin

In words with multiple syllables, the pronunciation of vowel letters is highly dependent on the placement of tonic stress, which unfortunately is not marked in English spelling and which cannot be determined by any simple rule.

The pronunciation of "syrup" is tricky

"Syrup" is a tricky example word to discuss because various pronunciations exist. Some people say /⁠ˈsɪrəp/ with a "short i" sound. Many North American English speakers have a general shift of /ɪr/ to /ir/ (the "long e" sound followed by "r"), so they say /ˈsirəp/. Other speakers say /ˈsɜrəp/, with the vowel of "nurse": this is an irregular sound change that pretty much only applies to this word (although it somewhat resembles the more widespread use of the "nurse" vowel in the word "squirrel," and I believe dialectally the "nurse" vowel may be used in "spirit"). You can see an overview map of the North American pronunciations on the website of the Harvard Dialect Survey. Almost exactly half of their respondents used the "nurse" vowel in "syrup."