Won - pil Kim. 2002. Urug uáy or Urú g uay ? S tud ies in M od e rn Grammar 27, 179 - 196 . While in English the letter y can operate not only as a semi- vowel or a semi- consonant - day, stay, y es, y oung - but as a whole vowel - my, cry, study, every, p sy chology - , in Spanish it functions, in some cases, as a semi- consonant at the initial position of a syllable or a word - yo, leyó, leyeron, leyendo- , and in others as a fricative palatal consonant at the same position - y eg ua, cónyug e- . But in the case that the y is positoned after a vowel, as in the toponym 'Uruguay ' , it is pronounced in Spanish as [urugwái]. Therefore we are likely to define it as a consonant, because the Real Academia Española determines it as oxytone, when a word ends in a consonant except n and s . But this is not acceptable because the y is not allowed as a fricative consonant after a vowel. When treating the last syllable as a set of vowels, that is, a triphthong, it is not acceptable either, due to the discrepancy with the Spanish accent rules. Therefore we now suppose that the final vowel y constitutes a separate vowel as the result of 'hiatus ' , regarding that there exists, in Italian and Portuguese, a general tendency of syllabification of the high and weak vowel / i/ , as in 'Uruguai' , and that 'Uruguay ' is a loanword from the Indian language where the vowel y formed a sememe ('river ' ). In addition to this ethymological aspect we must take account of the psychological aspect . Who are very accustomed to Spanish tend to accommodate to the paroxytone, the general tendency of Spanish, especially for the words that are composed of any morphological and semantical elements at the word- final position, as in habláis, estudiáis .

• 김원필 | Won Pil Kim