Y
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Template:AZ Y is the twenty-fifth letter of the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is wy, sometimes spelled wye (both pronounced Template:IPA).
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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, Υψιλον (Ypsilon) was pronounced IPA /u/, then later on as /y/ — a 'rounded' vowel similar to that in the word 'few'. 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, with the value /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 Graeca (pronounced [u graɪka]) meaning 'Greek u' in contradistinction from native Latin /u/, came to be analyzed as the letter V (pronounced [uː]) atop the letter I (pronounced [i:]). 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 become [i], and Y came to be used with the same values as I, [iː] and [ɪ] and [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 Template:IPA.
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, for example, it's called ypsilon. 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.
Originally, Y was a vowel letter in Greek, representing [u] and later on, front rounded [y], becoming [i] in Modern Greek.
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, in Finnish, and the Scandinavian languages, where it can never be a consonant. But in diphthongs, as in the name name Meyer, it serves as a variant of "i".
In Dutch, Y appears only in loanwords and names and is usually pronounced [i]. It is often left out of the Dutch alphabet and replaced with the "letter 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 archaicly, 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. It is pronounced as "EE" is in English (in the IPA its sound is written [i]). In Spanish family names, an y (meaning "and") can separate the father's surname from the mother's surname as in "Santiago Ramón y Cajal". Catalan names use i for this.
Other Languages
Italian, too, has Y only in very few loanwords. In Polish and Guaraní, it represents the close central unrounded vowel.
In contrast, in the Latin transcription of Nenets (Nyenec) the letter "y" palatalizes the preceding consonant. The letter Y nicely 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
{{Letter |NATO=Yankee |Morse=–·–– |Character=Y |Braille=⠽ }} 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.
- Brigham Young University (BYU) or the large "Y" made of stones on the mountain overlooking BYU.
- In astronomy,
- 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. Template:Mpl).
- In biochemistry, Y is the symbol for tyrosine.
- In chemistry, Y is the symbol for yttrium.
- In color models,
- 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,
yis 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,
- In mathematics, y is the usual symbol for the variable represented on the vertical axis (ordinate) in analytic geometry.
- In scheduled air transport, Y is used to refer to economy class seating (first class is F).
- In the SI system,
- As the first letter of a postal code,
- In sociology, Y refers to Generation Y.
- In statistics and analysis, y commonly denotes the dependent variable.
- In Internet slang, Y is commonly referred to as "why" due to the similarity in pronunciation, see yellow why
See also
Template:AZsubnavals:Y ca:Y sn:Y cs:Y da:Y de:Y et:Y el:Y es:Y eo:Y fr:Y gl:Y ko:Y it:Y he:Y kw:Y la:Y nl:Y ja:Y no:Y nn:Y pl:Y pt:Y ro:Y ru:Y (буква) simple:Y sl:Y fi:Y sv:Y tl:Y vi:Y yo:Y zh:Y