Y
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 .
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/y griega, in Catalan i grega, in French and Romanian i grec, in Polish igrek - all meaning "Greek i" (except for Polish, where it is simply a phonetic transcription of the French name); in most other European languages the Greek name is still used; in German, for example, it is called Ypsilon (or also sometimes spelt "Üpsilon") and in Portuguese it's called ípsilon or ípsilo (although in Portuguese there is also the name "Greek i"). In the standard English language, the letter Y is traditionally regarded as a consonant, but a survey of almost any English text will show that Y more commonly functions as a vowel.
In many cases, it is known as a semivowel.
After fronting from /u/, Greek /y/ de-rounded to /i/.
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 the Scandinavian languages and /ʏ/ in German. It is often left out of the Dutch alphabet and replaced with the "ligature IJ".
In Afrikaans, a development of Dutch, Y denotes the diphthong , 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 Castille (Ysabel) and Ferdinand II of Aragon.
This spelling was reformed by the Royal Spanish Academy and currently is only found in proper names spelt archaically, 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 is a grammatical conjunction with the meaning "and" in Spanish and is pronounced /i/.
In Spanish family names, y can separate the father's surname from the mother's surname as in "Santiago Ramón y Cajal". When coming before the sound /i/, Y is replaced with E: "español e inglés".
This is to avoid pronouncing /i/ twice.
The letter Y is called "i/y griega", the "Greek I", after the Greek letter Ypsilon.
Other Languages
Italian, too, has Y (i greca or ipsilon) in a small number of loanwords.
In Polish and Guaraní, it represents the close central unrounded vowel (IPA: /ɨ/)
In Finnish and Albanian, Y is always pronounced /y/.
In Lithuanian Y is the 15th letter and is a vowel. It is called the long i and is pronounced /i:/ like in English see.
In Faroese and Icelandic, it's always pronounced i.
It can also be the part of diphthongs: ey and oy (Faroese only).
In Azerbaijani Y is pronounced as ya.
In contrast, in the Latin transcription of Nenets (Nyenec) the letter "y" palatalizes the preceding consonant. The letter Y shows how letters change their function.
When used as a vowel in Vietnamese, the letter y represents the close front unrounded vowel.