Y

Y is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the vowel /y/ or /i/. Historically it is adopted directly from Greek upsilon in the first century BCE to spell Greek loanwords, and long called 'Greek i'. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter Y the digit 7; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

Y entered the Latin alphabet later and by a different route than most of its neighbours. Classical Latin's native alphabet, inherited from Etruscan, had no letter shaped like the Greek vowel upsilon; when Rome began transliterating large numbers of Greek loanwords and proper names during the late Republic, its scribes borrowed upsilon directly from Greek, rather than adapting an existing Etruscan-derived letter, and placed the new letter at the very end of the alphabet alongside Z rather than inserting it into upsilon's original Greek position, roughly where U and V already sat.

Because of this late, direct borrowing, Y in classical Latin usage was largely confined to Greek words, such as the many technical and philosophical terms Latin absorbed from Greek, and Roman grammarians noted its foreign character explicitly, sometimes calling it the Greek y for the difficulty native Latin speakers had pronouncing the rounded Greek vowel it represented. Its graphic shape, a V or U form topped by a shorter stem, has changed little since that Republican-era borrowing, and Y carries no Roman numeral value, since it entered Latin too late and too narrowly to be absorbed into the numeral system built around the alphabet's older core letters.