The letter 'Y' is the twenty-fifth letter in the modern
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English is ''wye'' or ''wy'' .
History
The original ancestor of Y was the Semitic letter ''
Waw'', which was also the ultimate origin of the modern letters
F,
U,
V, and
W. See
F for details.
In
Ancient Greek, Υψιλον (''
Upsilon'') represented
IPA , then later on —
close front rounded vowel. The
Romans had already borrowed this as the letter V, to represent both the vowel as well as the consonant , but in later times, because the pronunciation of ''Ypsilon'' in Greek had shifted to , they borrowed it directly in its original form, stem and all, as Y — mainly to represent names and words taken from Greek.
The letter Y was used in
Old English, as in
Latin, to represent ; however, some claim that this use was an independent invention in England created by stacking a V and an I, unrelated to the Latin use of the letter. Regardless, it is fairly likely that the letter, although technically named ''Y Græca'' (IPA ) meaning 'Greek u' in contradistinction from native Latin , came to be analyzed as the letter
V (called ) atop the letter
I (called ). The letter was thus referred to as , which after became the glide and after English's
Great Vowel Shift naturally became .
By
Middle English, had lost its
roundedness and merged with , and Y came to be used with the same values as I, and as well as . Those dialects that retained spelled it with U, under French influence.
The
Modern English use of Y is a direct continuation of this Middle English use.
Thus the words ''myth'' [of Greek origin] and ''gift'' [of Old English origin],
which originally contained high front rounded vowels, both have .
With the introduction of printing, the letter Y was used by
Caxton and other printers in
England to represent the
letter thorn (Þ, þ) which was lacking from continental
typefaces, resulting in the use of ''ye'' for the word ''the''.
Usage
In Spanish, Y is called ''i griega'', in Catalan ''i grega'', in French ''i grec'', in Polish ''igrek'' - all meaning "Greek i" (except for Polish, where it doesn't mean anything, it's just a phonetic transcription of the Latin name); in most other European languages the Greek name is still used; in German and in Portuguese, for example, it's called ''Ãpsilon'' or ''Ãpsilo'' (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 as a survey of almost any English text, including this one, will show, Y more commonly functions as a vowel. In many cases, it is known as a
semivowel (a type of consonant).
After fronting from ,
Greek de-rounded to .
In
English morphology, ''-y'' is a
diminutive suffix.
Other Germanic and Scandinavian Languages
When not serving as the second vowel in a
diphthong, it has the sound value in the
Scandinavian languages and 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 . 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 [EI], probably as a result of mixing lower case i and y or may derive from the IJ ligature.
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 spelt 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 .
In
Spanish family names, ''y'' can separate the father's surname from the mother's surname as in "
Santiago Ramón y Cajal". Catalan names use ''i'' for this. Otherwise, Y represents in Spanish. When coming before the sound , Y is replaced with E: "español e inglés". This is to avoid pronouncing twice.
The letter Y is called "I griega", the "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
GuaranÃ, it represents the
close central unrounded vowel.
In
Finnish and
Albanian, Y is always pronounced .
In
Faroese and
Icelandic, it's always pronounced . It can also be the part of diphthongs: ey and oy (Faroese only).
In
Azerbaijani Y is pronounced as .
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.
Significance in the IPA
In the
International Phonetic Alphabet, corresponds to the
close front rounded vowel, and the slightly different character corresponds to the
near-close near-front rounded vowel.
It is indicative of the rarity of front rounded vowels that is the rarest sound represented in the IPA by a letter of the Latin alphabet, being cross-linguitically less than half as frequent as
or
and only about a quarter as frequent as
.
Codes for computing
In
Unicode the
capital Y is codepoint U+0059 and the
lowercase 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
For other uses and meanings of the letter "Y", see
Y (disambiguation). See also:
★
★
Upsilon
★
У
★ (hooked Y)
References
1. Omniglot
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