We need 'y' to be a consonant, but it acts more like a vowel.
By first grade, we were taught that the letters a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y are vowels. Most of us probably accepted what we were told (it was just another "rule" we had to follow), and never questioned why that last part was true (there were other things to wonder about, like snack time). Additionally, we unconditionally accepted that the other 20 letters in the English alphabet were strictly consonants. To most, those vowels and consonants were just letters, but to that first grader who aspired to be a linguist, they were more than merely lines on a page.
