Y

The letter Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. In English it is pronounced wy /waɪ/. more...

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Y
yu gi
yu-gi-oh!
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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) 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 ) 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 , 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 and gift , which originally contained high front rounded vowels, both have .

Read more at Wikipedia.org