| Basic Latin alphabet | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | ||
| Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | ||
| Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn |
| Oo | Pp | 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 either a vowel or a consonant in English.
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In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was 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/ (previously written with the rune yr ᚣ). 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 the Modern English wy (/waɪ/).
Y is the only letter (other than US/Irish "zee" for Z) whose name in English is wholly unrelated to its name in French (and other Romance languages).
The furthest back direct ancestor of English letter Y was the Semitic letter waw, from which also come F, U, V, and W. See F for details. The Greek and Latin alphabets developed from the Phoenician form of this early alphabet. In Modern English, there is also some historical influence from the old English letter yogh (Ȝȝ), which develop from Semitic gimel, as shown below.
| Phoenician | Greek | Latin | English (approximate times of changes) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Old | Middle | Modern | |||
| V → | U → | V/U/UU → | V/U/W | ||
| Y → | Y (vowel /y/) → | Y (vowel /i/) → | Y (vowels) | ||
| C → | |||||
| G → | Ȝ → | G → | |||
| consonantal Y /j/ → | Y (consonant) | ||||
| Þ → | Y /th/ | - | |||
As a consonant in English, Y is normally a palatal approximant, /j/ (year, German Jahr). This is possibly influenced by the Middle English letter yogh (Ȝȝ), which represented /j/. Yogh's other sound, /ɣ/, came to be written "gh" in Modern English.
Y first appeared as the Greek letter upsilon. The Romans borrowed a small form of upsilon as the single letter V, representing both /u/ and its consonantal variant /w/. In later ways of writing Latin, V is typically written as U, for a vowel, or V for the consonant. However, this first loaning of upsilon into Latin is not the source of Modern English Y.
The usage of the capital form of upsilon, Y as opposed to U, V, or W, dates back to the Latin of the first century BC, when upsilon was introduced a second time, this time with its "foot" to distinguish it. It was used to transcribe loanwords from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek, which had the non-Latin sound /y/. Because it was not a native sound of Latin it 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 letter was also used for other languages with a /y/ sound. Some words of Italic origin were re-spelled with a y: Latin silva 'forest' was commonly spelled sylva, in analogy with the Greek cognate and synonym ὕλη.[2]
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), which in inscriptions was sometimes used for Greek upsilon instead.
In Old English there was a native /y/ sound, and so both Latin U and Y were adapted for use. 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. (Some dialects, however, retained the sound /y/ and spelled it U, following French usage.)
Likewise, Modern English vocalic Y is pronounced identically to the letter 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 before vowel endings (dy-ing, justify-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.[3]
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.
Y has the sound values /y/ or /ʏ/ in the Scandinavian languages and in German. It can never be a consonant (except for loanwords), but can appear in diphthongs, as in the name Meyer, where 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 the Afrikaans language, a descendant of Dutch, Y denotes the diphthong [ɛi], which may derive from the IJ ligature.
In Faroese and Icelandic, Y is always pronounced /i/. In both languages, it can also form part of diphthongs such as ⟨ey⟩ (both language) and ⟨oy⟩ (Faroese only).
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, or ye.
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 /iː/ like in English see.
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], as in English.
In Malagasy, the letter y represents the final variation of /ɨ/.
In Japan, Ⓨ is a symbol used for resale price maintenance.
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].
The IPA symbol [j] ("jod") represents the sound of the English letter ⟨y⟩ in the word "yes".
| character | Y | y | ||
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y | LATIN SMALL LETTER Y | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 89 | 0059 | 121 | 0079 |
| UTF-8 | 89 | 59 | 121 | 79 |
| Numeric character reference | Y | Y | y | y |
| EBCDIC family | 232 | E8 | 168 | A8 |
| ASCII 1 | 89 | 59 | 121 | 79 |
1 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | ||
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Letter Y with diacritics
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| Ýý | Ỳỳ | Ŷŷ | Y̊ẙ | Ÿÿ | Ỹỹ | Ẏẏ | Ȳȳ | Ỷỷ | Ỵỵ | Ɏɏ | Ƴƴ | ʏ | ||||||||||||||
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Related
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