Pig Latin Translator (Learned through Codecademy.com's Python Track). There must be a shorter way to determine a vowel within a word.

gistfile1.txt

# Defining main variables for translator

pyg = 'ay'
original = raw_input('Enter a word:')
word = original.lower()
first = word [0]

#Beginning of if/else statements

if len(original) > 0 and original.isalpha():
    if first == "a" or first == "e" or first == "i" or first == "o" or first == "u":
      new_word = word+pyg
        print new_word
    else: 
        new_word = word[1:]+first+pyg
        print new_word
else:
    print 'empty'