Y

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

Y ( /ˈwaɪ/; named wye or wy, plural wyes)^[1] is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents a vowel in most languages that use it. It has also been known as the Samian letter, referring to the use of the Greek letter upsilon by Pythagoras as an emblem of the path of virtue or vice.^[2]

Contents 1 History 2 Usage 2.1 Other Germanic Languages 2.2 Spanish 2.3 Other languages 3 Significance in the IPA 4 Codes for computing 5 See also 6 References

History

The ancestor of Y was the Semitic letter waw, from which also come F, U, V, and W. See F for details.

The usage of Y in Latin dates back to the first century BC. It was used to transcribe loanwords from Greek, so it was not a native sound of Latin and was usually pronounced /u/ or /i/. The latter pronunciation was the most common in the Classical period and was used by most people except the educated ones. The Roman Emperor Claudius proposed introducing a new letter into the Latin alphabet to transcribe the so-called sonus medius (a short vowel before labial consonants), but in inscriptions was sometimes used for Greek upsilon instead.

Y first appeared as the Greek letter upsilon. The Romans borrowed upsilon first as the letter V, representing both /u/ and its consonantal variant /w/ — U and V in Latin loan words to English.

When pronunciation of upsilon in the prestigious Attic dialect changed to /y/, the Romans borrowed it again as Y to write Greek loan-words. Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was no doubt pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing /y/, which was not a native sound. In Romance languages, the pronunciation became the regular name: Spanish i griega, French i grec, etc.

Old English borrowed Latin Y to write the native Old English sound /y/. When the letter came to be analyzed as a V atop an I (First Grammatical Treatise), it was renamed VI (/uː iː/), which was simplified to one syllable (/wiː/), and by the Great Vowel Shift became Modern English wy (/waɪ/).

By the time of Middle English, /y/ had lost its roundedness and became identical to I (/iː/ and /ɪ/). Therefore, many words that originally had I were spelled with Y, and vice-versa. A similar substitution occurred in Latin words: original silva "wood" is spelled with Y in Pennsylvania.

(Some dialects, however, retained the sound /y/ and spelled it U, following French usage.)

Likewise, Modern English vocalic Y is pronounced identically to I. But Modern English uses it in only certain places, unlike Middle and early Modern English. It has three uses: for upsilon in Greek loan-words (system: Greek σύστημα), at the end of a word (rye, city; compare cities, where S is final), and in monosyllabic stems before vowel endings (dy-ing).

When printing was introduced from the continent, Caxton and other English printers used Y in place of Þ (thorn: Modern English th), which did not exist in continental typefaces. From this convention comes the spelling of "the" as "ye" in the mock archaism "Ye Olde Shoppe". But in spite of the spelling, pronunciation was the same as for modern "the" (stressed /ðiː/, unstressed /ðə/). Ye (/jiː/) is purely a modern spelling pronunciation.

The consonantal use of Y for /j/ (year, German Jahr) is probably unrelated to vocalic use. Perhaps it was a typesetters' substitution for the Middle English letter yogh (Ȝȝ) where it represented /j/. Yogh representing the letter's other sound, /ɣ/, came to be written gh in Modern English.

Greek	Latin	English
		Old	Middle	Modern
	V
	Y →	Y →	~ I	I (Y)
			yogh →	consonantal Y

Usage

In Spanish, Y is called i/y griega, in Catalan i grega, in French and Romanian i grec, in Polish igrek - all meaning "Greek i" (except for Polish, where it is simply a phonetic transcription of the French name); in most other European languages the Greek name is still used; in German, for example, it is called Ypsilon and in Portuguese and Italian it's called ípsilon or ípsilo (although in Portuguese there is also the name "Greek i"). [1] The letter Y was originally established as a vowel. In the standard English language, the letter Y is traditionally regarded as a consonant, but a survey of almost any English text will show that Y more commonly functions as a vowel. In many cases, it is known as a semivowel.

After fronting from /u/, Greek /y/ de-rounded to /i/.

In English morphology, -y is an adjectival suffix.

Other Germanic Languages

When not serving as the second vowel in a diphthong, it has the sound value /y/ in the Scandinavian languages and /ʏ/ in German. Y can never be a consonant (except for loanwords), but in diphthongs, as in the name Meyer, it serves as a variant of "i".

In Dutch, Y appears only in loanwords and names and usually represents /i/. It is often left out of the Dutch alphabet and replaced with the "ligature IJ". In Afrikaans, a development of Dutch, Y denotes the diphthong [ɛi], probably as a result of mixing lower case i and y or may derive from the IJ ligature.

In Faroese and Icelandic, it's always pronounced i. In Faroese, it can also be the part of diphthongs: ey and oy.

Spanish

In the Spanish language, Y was used as a word-initial form of I that was more visible. (German has used J in a similar way.) Hence "el yugo y las flechas" was a symbol sharing the initials of Isabella I of Castille (Ysabel) and Ferdinand II of Aragon. This spelling was reformed by the Royal Spanish Academy and currently is only found in proper names spelled archaically, such as Ybarra or CYII, the symbol of the Canal de Isabel II. X is also still used in Spanish with a different sound in some archaisms.

Appearing alone as a word, the letter Y is a grammatical conjunction with the meaning "and" in Spanish and is pronounced /i/. In Spanish family names, y can separate the father's surname from the mother's surname as in "Santiago Ramón y Cajal"; another example is "Maturin y Domanova", from the Jack Aubrey novel sequence. Catalan names use i for this. Otherwise, Y represents /ʝ/ in Spanish. When coming before the sound /i/, Y is replaced with E: "español e inglés". This is to avoid pronouncing /i/ twice.

The letter Y is called "i/y griega", literally meaning "Greek I", after the Greek letter ypsilon.

Other languages

Italian, too, has Y (i greca or ipsilon) in a small number of loanwords.

In Polish and Guaraní, it represents the vowel /ɨ/.

In Welsh it is pronounced /ə/ in monosyllabic words or non-final syllables, and /ɨ/ or /i/ (depending on the accent) in final syllables.

In Finnish and Albanian, Y is always pronounced /y/.

In Lithuanian Y is the 15th letter and is a vowel. It is called the long i and is pronounced /i:/ like in English see.

In contrast, in the Latin transcription of Nenets (Nyenec) the letter "y" palatalizes the preceding consonant. The letter Y shows how letters change their function.

When used as a vowel in Vietnamese, the letter y represents the close front unrounded vowel. When used as a monophthong, it is functionally equivalent to the Vietnamese letter i. Thus, Mỹ Lai does not rhyme but mỳ Lee does. There have been efforts to replace all such uses with i altogether, but they have been largely unsuccessful. As a consonant, it represents the palatal approximant.

In Aymara, Turkish, Quechua as in Romaji in Japanese, all Y is a palatal consonant, always denoting /j/

In Japan, Ⓨ is a symbol used for resale price maintenance.

Significance in the IPA

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [y] corresponds to the close front rounded vowel, and the slightly different character [ʏ] corresponds to the near-close near-front rounded vowel.

It is indicative of the rarity of front rounded vowels that [y] is the rarest sound represented in the IPA by a letter of the Latin alphabet, being cross-linguistically less than half as frequent as [q] or [c] and only about a quarter as frequent as [x].

Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital Y is codepoint U+0059 and the lower case y is U+0079.

The ASCII code for capital Y is 89 and for lowercase y is 121; or in binary 01011001 and 01111001, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital Y is 232 and for lowercase y is 168.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "Y" and "y" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

• Υ, υ, the Greek upsilon
• У, у, the Cyrillic U
• Ы, ы, the Cyrillic Yeru
• Ү, ү, the Cyrillic Ue (Straight U)
• ¥, a currency symbol

References

Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter Y with diacritics ÝýỲỳŶŷY̊ẙŸÿỸỹẎẏȲȳỶỷỴỵɎɏƳƴʏ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646