lets talk about the letter "Y" as you mentioned earlier.
Y:
The 25th letter of the modern English alphabet.
Any of the speech sounds represented by the letter y.
The 25th in a series.
Something shaped like the letter Y.
Y:
Y is the twenty-fifth letter of 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) 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
Græca (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 [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. 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 Guaran*, 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.
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Y. me
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