Y
Y, or y, is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and the sixth (or seventh if including W) vowel letter[1] of the modern English alphabet. In the English writing system, it mostly represents a vowel and seldom a consonant, and in other orthographies it may represent a vowel or a consonant. Its name in English is wye[2] (pronounced /ˈwaɪ/), plural wyes.[3]
In Latin, Y was named I graeca ("Greek I"), since the classical Greek sound /y/, similar to modern German ü or French u, was not a native sound for Latin speakers, and the letter was initially only used to spell foreign words. This history has led to the standard modern names of the letter in Romance languages – i grego in Galician, i grega in Catalan, i grec in French and Romanian, i greca in Italian – all meaning "Greek I". The names igrek in Polish and i gờ-rét in Vietnamese are both phonetic borrowings of the French name. In Dutch, both Griekse ij and i-grec are used, as well as ypsilon. In Spanish, Y is also called i griega; however, in the twentieth century, the shorter name ye was proposed and was officially recognized as its name in 2010 by the Real Academia Española, although its original name is still accepted.[4]
The original Greek name υ ψιλόν (upsilon) has also been adapted into several modern languages. For example, it is called Ypsilon in German, ypsilon in Dutch, ufsilon i in Icelandic. Both names are used in Italian, ipsilon or i greca; likewise in Portuguese, ípsilon or i grego.[5] In Faroese, the letter is simply called seinna i ("later i") because of its later place in the alphabet.
Old English borrowed Latin Y to write the native Old English sound /y/ (previously written with the rune yr ᚣ). The name of the letter may be related to 'ui' (or 'vi') in various medieval languages;[citation needed] in Middle English it was 'wi' /wiː/,[citation needed] which through the Great Vowel Shift became the Modern English 'wy' /waɪ/.
The oldest direct ancestor of English letter Y was the Semitic letter waw (pronounced as [w]), 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.
Since Late Middle English, the letter Y came to be used in a number of words where earlier Middle English spelling contained the letter yogh (Ȝȝ), which developed from the letter G, ultimately from Semitic gimel – as described below (As a side note - Modern Greek lowercase gamma <γ> is somewhat similarly shaped to the lowercase letter <y>).
