The letter Y
is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English () is spelled wye
or occasionally wy
, plural wyes.
[1]
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Y TICKETS
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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, ? (
Upsilon
) represented , and was borrowed by the
Romans as the letter V to represent both the vowel and the consonant . In later times, the pronunciation of the Greek letter shifted to , and the Romans borrowed it again, as Y, to represent the new sound — mainly in 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 a type-setters' substitution for an old
runic letter Yogh
, unrelated to the Latin use of the letter. Regardless, it is fairly likely that the letter, although technically named
Y Græca
() "Greek u" in contradistinction from native Latin , came to be analyzed as the letter
V (called ) atop the letter
I (called ). Such an analysis is made explicit in the
First Grammatical Treatise. The letter was thus referred to as , which fused to and after English's
Great Vowel Shift 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, although eventually vocalic Y became essentially restricted to three contexts: word-final (e.g.
city
; cf. the plural
cities
); representing upsilon in borrowings from Greek (e.g.
system
); and in some words from monosyllabic stems before a vowel (e.g.
rye
, and
dying
.)
[2]. Y remains the standard spelling of the consonant .
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
. The pronunciation always remained (stressed), (unstressed); the occasionally encountered is purely a modern
spelling pronunciation.
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
(or also sometimes spelt "Üpsilon") and in Portuguese it's called
ípsilon
or
ípsilo
(although in Portuguese there is also the name "Greek i"). 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 ,
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 [?i], 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"; another example is "Maturin y Domanova", from the
Jack Aubrey novel sequence. 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/y griega", "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
close central unrounded vowel (IPA: /?/)
In
Finnish and
Albanian, Y is always pronounced .
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
Faroese and
Icelandic, it's always pronounced . It can also be the part of diphthongs: ey and oy (Faroese only).
In
Turkish Y is pronounced .
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,
M? Lai
does not rhyme but
m? Lee
does. There have been efforts to replace all such uses with
i
altogether, but they have been largely unsuccessful.
In
Quechua and
Aymara, Y is always .
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-linguistically less than half as frequent as
or
and only about a quarter as frequent as
.
Codes for computing
Alternative representations of
| NATO phonetic
| Morse code
|
| Yankee
| –·––
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| Signal flag
| Flag semaphore
| Braille
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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
|Y}}
}}
- ?, the Greek upsilon
- ?, the Cyrillic U
- ?, the Cyrillic Yeru
- ?, the Cyrillic Ue (Straight U)
- ¥, a currency symbol
References
- "Y" ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989); ''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged'' (1993); "wy," op. cit.
- C. M. Millward, ''A Biography of the English Language'' 2nd ed., Wadsworth (1996), p. 159, ISBN 0-1550-1645-8.