Spoilers for Wednesday 9th June 2021 (Series 83, Prelim 113)

[Toby McDonald]

ROUTINER in R7
MAUVEST/UNMATES in R13

[Stewart Gordon]

Interesting talk about whether Y is a vowel or a consonant. Strictly speaking, letters aren't vowels or consonants - phonemes are. But in practice, we tend to refer to letters as consonants or vowels. And of course, Countdown classifies letters as such.

"You can't substitute the Y when it's used as a consonant." Really? What about OPINION? ALUMINIUM? Probably many others....

I suppose the real reason for classifying the letter Y as a consonant is that:

• it's the usual written representation in English of the /j/ phoneme, hence this sound is what people usually mean when they talk of a 'y' sound
• semiconsonants/semivowels are not commonly distinguished from consonants.

The Grape Vine was a shareware hangman game for MS-DOS, which had an extra rule "back-to-back vowels not allowed". For the purpose of this rule, it classified Y as a vowel.

Sporcle seems to have a standard whereby Y may be classified as a consonant or a vowel, used in various quizzes that challenge you to identify things from which the vowels have been removed. But this standard is self-inconsistent: other letters that can sometimes represent vowel sounds - whether by themselves or in combination with other letters - would be of fixed classification. (For example, EIGHT without the vowels should really be T, but according to Sporcle rules it would be GHT.) Moreover, some that purportedly follow this standard claim that Y is a consonant in PARAGUAY and URUGUAY - I still don't know how the quiz-setters pronounce these.

It's a shame there doesn't seem to be a Welsh language version of Countdown. In this, Y would be classed as a vowel. I guess W would be classed as a consonant but subject to the same debate as we have about Y.

[Stewart Gordon]

My original solution to the final numbers game was
75 × 3 + 100 ÷ 50 - 5 - 4
Then I randomly realised it can be done as a product of two primes:
(100 + 5 + 4) × (50 × 3 ÷ 75)
Though I think product of two primes solutions usually have addition/subtraction at all the second-level tree nodes....

[Gavin Chipper]

I thought Susie's explanation about when Y is a vowel was a bit strange, as she gave lots of overly specific examples rather than more general rules. E.g. when there aren't any other vowels in the word like in "myth". It's just the sound it makes that's relevant. If it's pronounced "i" as in "hit", "eye" as in "eye" etc.

[David Williams]

It's a shame there doesn't seem to be a Welsh language version of Countdown. In this, Y would be classed as a vowel. I guess W would be classed as a consonant but subject to the same debate as we have about Y.

Welsh is pretty much a phonetic language. W is one of the seven vowels. There are 22 consonants. EISTEDDFOD is ten letters in English, but would get you 18 points in Welsh Countdown.

[David Williams]

Just on that final numbers, I parked the 3 and 4, and quickly saw
5 x 50 +75 -100
Then I saw
5 x (75 - 50) +100
And finally
5 x 75 -100 -50
The actual solution escaped me entirely.