Y Information

Y ( / ˈ w aɪ /; named wye or wy, plural wyes)^[1] is the twenty-fifth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.

Name

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). The name may be related to ui in various medieval languages; in Middle English it was wi /wiː/, which through the Great Vowel Shift became the Modern English wy /waɪ/.

Y is the only letter (other than US/Irish "zee" for Z) whose name is unrelated to its name in modern Romance languages.

History

Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and Latin

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.

Consonant

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 Middle English, and although the sound is no longer pronounced in standard modern English silent "gh" is common in many words where this sound was once present, such as "through" and "caught".)

Vowel

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.

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).

Orthographic confusion with the letter thorn

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]

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 Italian the name is ípsilon or ípsilo. In Portuguese, both names are used (ípsilon and i grego). [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

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).

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, or ye.

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 /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 Turkmen, Y represents [ɯ].

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

International Phonetic Alphabet

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".

Related letters and other similar characters

• Υ υ : Greek letter Upsilon
• У у : Cyrillic letter U
• Ү ү : Cyrillic letter Ue (Straight U)
• Ы ы : Cyrillic letter Yery, commonly romanized as ⟨y⟩
• ¥ : a currency symbol

Computing codes

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

References

1. ^ "Y" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "wy," op. cit.
2. ^ Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, 1989; online version June 2011, s.v. 'sylva'
3. ^ Burchfield, R.W., ed. (1996), "Ye", The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 860

External links

• Media related to Y at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for Y
• The Wiktionary entry for y

Categories:

• ISO basic Latin letters
• Vowel letters

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See Also:

• Home
• Arabic
• Circa
• Hamza
• Hebrew Alphabet
• International Phonetic Alphabet
• Kuf
• Phoenician Alphabet
• Qoph
• Qophs