Y

The letter Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is wy, sometimes spelled wye (both pronounced /waɪ/).

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 (Ypsilon) represented IPA /u/, then later on /y/ — close front rounded vowel. The Romans had already borrowed this as the letter V, to represent both the vowel /u/ as well as the consonant /w/, but in later times, because the pronunciation of Ypsilon in Greek had shifted to /y/, 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 /y/; 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 [u graɪka]) meaning 'Greek u' in contradistinction from native Latin /u/, came to be analyzed as the letter V (called /uː/) atop the letter I (called /iː/). The letter was thus referred to as [uː iː], which after /uː/ became the glide /w/ and after English's Great Vowel Shift naturally became /waɪ/.

By Middle English, /y/ had lost its roundedness and merged with/i/, and Y came to be used with the same values as I, /iː/ and /ɪ/ as well as /j/. Those dialects that retained /y/ 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 [ɪ].

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 Polish igrek, in French i grec - all meaning "Greek i"; in most other European languages the Greek name is still used; in German and in Portuguese, for example, it's called ypsilon or ípsilon (although Portuguese has dropped y and uses i exclusively today) [1]. The letter Y was originally established as a vowel. In the standard English language, the letter Y is traditionally regarded as a consonant (as depicted in American game show Wheel of Fortune), 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 /u/, Greek /y/ de-rounded to /i/.

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 /y/ in German and the Scandinavian languages, where it can never be a consonant. 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 [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 Castile (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 means "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". Catalan names use i for this. Otherwise, Y represents /ʝ/ in Spanish. When coming before an E sound, Y is replaced with E, "español e inglés". This is to avoid saying the E sound 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 very few loanwords. In Polish and Guaraní, it represents the close central unrounded vowel.

In Finnish, Y is always pronounced /y/.

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

Codes for computing

class="template-letter-box | 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.

Meanings of "Y"

"The Y" is short for:
- the YMCA, or sometimes, the YWCA.
- the YMHA or YWHA.
- Brigham Young University (BYU) or the large "Y" made of stones on the mountain overlooking BYU.
In astronomy,
- Y stands for an hypothetical ultra-cool brown dwarf class of stars.
- Y stands for a December 16 through 31 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet (e.g. C/1823 Y1, the Great Comet of 1823) or asteroid (e.g. (4324) 1981 YA1).
In biochemistry, Y is the symbol for tyrosine.
In chemistry, Y is the symbol for yttrium.
In color models,
- Y stands for the color yellow in the CMYK color model.
- Y stands for luminance in many color models used for television broadcast, such as YIQ and YUV.
In combinatory logic, Y is the name of a well known fixed point combinator.
In comic books, Y: The Last Man is the title of a DC comics series by Brian K. Vaughan.
In command line interpreters like 4DOS, y is a command to concatenate the output of two or more streams.
In economics, Y is used to represent income.
In electrical engineering, Y is the symbol for admittance, the inverse of impedance.
In film, Y is the name of a 1987 Swedish film; see Y (film).
In finance, Y is the U.S. ticker symbol for Alleghany Corporation.
In games, Y is the name of a modern board game, played on a triangle-shaped board; see Y (game)
In genetics Y denotes the Y chromosome.
- In sex, XY denotes male in the XY sex-determination system.
In geography,
"Y" is the name of a village in the Somme department of France
- Y is the name of a place in Alaska; see Y, Alaska.
- Y is the name of a commune in the Somme département of France; see Y, Somme.
In mathematics, y is the usual symbol for the variable represented on the vertical axis (ordinate) in analytic geometry.
In SketchUp, y is the green axis.
In scheduled air transport, Y is used to refer to economy class seating (first class is F).
In the SI system,
- Y, yotta is the SI prefix meaning 10²⁴.
- y, yocto is the SI prefix meaning 10^-24.
As the first letter of a postal code,
- In Canada, Y stands for the Yukon.
In sociology, Y refers to Generation Y.
In statistics and mathematical analysis, y commonly denotes the dependent variable.
In Internet slang, Y is commonly referred to as "why" due to the similarity in pronunciation.