Talk:Upsilon

Untitled
http://users.otenet.gr/~bm-celusy/upsilon.html

Maybe it's worth to mention that some languages, such as German and the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish,...) still use Y like the classical Greek upsilon, ie. pronunced like IPA [y]. Even though it is rarely used in German, this letter is still called "Ypsilon" in this language.
 * Of course, Ypsilon is the correct spelling (and pronounciation); the same applies to My and Ny. 91.55.105.211 20:49, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Is this also the symbol for Mass_to_light_ratio? CSWarren (talk) 12:23, 15 October 2010 (UTC) yes it is see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f83AwpY9zhc — Preceding unsigned comment added by Monkey-hammer (talk • contribs) 14:39, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Searching the internet, any non-medical references I've come across define 'hyoid' as 'u'-shaped. In regard to the hyoid bone, medical dictionaries show the etymology of the word as meaning 'upsilon' shaped, deriving back to the Greek origin (i.e., the Greek name for what we call the hyoid bone). The hyoid bone is obviously 'U'-shaped (I'm using a capital 'U' to show its actual 'horseshoe'-like shape). I would say, going by the shape of the bone, that the Greeks themselves, and onward, were saying the hyoid bone is shaped like the lowercase upsilon, not the uppercase upsilon ~Y-shape. I would understand that the 'spelling' of the Greek lowercase upsilon via Latin, gets changed to 'hy', which I think the article here actually explains. Anyway, the reference to hyoid meaning " 'y'-shaped" is either just wrong, or is correct in some context that requires much more explanation.Jauntymcd (talk) 15:27, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

The article reads: "In some languages (most notably German), the name upsilon, (üppsilon) is used to refer to the Latin letter Y as well as the Greek letter." - This is not true. There is no word "upsilon" in German, only "Ypsilon", which indeed refers not only to the letter "Y/y" in Latin and Greek but in all alphabets where it occurs. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.91.129.4 (talk) 07:45, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Pronunciation
The actual American pronunciation given by the OED ends with /lɑn/, which is the vowel used in American English for both palm and lot, but since the editors at IPAc-en apparently opt not to support American vowel readings, I went with the shorter supported alternative. — Llywelyn II   01:44, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Y with a hook
Why does it exist? — Llywelyn II   01:55, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected?!
Who would want to vandalize an article about a LETTER?

Anyhow, it is not correct that the Y sound does not exist 'in most English dialects'. In fact, it is exactly the sound you produce when you pronounce and hold the very first part of the word "YOU" - this produces a distinct "JYYYYY", and that vowel, well that it the very Y sound supposedly not existing in the English language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.83.1.90 (talk) 18:55, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 25 April 2018
Request to change "This was the case at least until the year 1030AD." in section 'Pronounciation' to "This was the case at least until the year AD 1030." 89.14.124.222 (talk) 19:14, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done &mdash; KuyaBriBri Talk 19:46, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Sound change
This article should not be edit-blocked. Anyway:


 * As an initial letter in Classical Greek, it always carried the rough breathing (equivalent to h) as reflected in the many Greek-derived English words, such as those that begin with hyper- and hypo-. This rough breathing was derived from an older pronunciation that used a sibilant instead; this sibilant was not lost in Latin, giving rise to such cognates as super- (for hyper-) and sub- (for hypo-).

The sound change is called debuccalization. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:CC:4200:1F3:DC1:2E7E:4683:7F41 (talk) 03:31, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Edit request
Please change

to

as there is a disambiguation page Ypsilon (disambiguation), and it has more than 2 options for Ypsilon

-- 65.94.170.98 (talk) 12:23, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done &mdash; KuyaBriBri Talk 17:36, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

"most notably German"
The section headed "Correspondence with Latin Y" says: "In some languages (most notably German), the name upsilon (Ypsilon in German, ípsilon in Portuguese) is used to refer to the Latin letter Y as well as the Greek letter."

Why is German "most notable"? In what way is the German language more "notable" than Portuguese, or for that matter Italian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian etc etc, all of which use some variation on ypsilon as the name of the letter Y? If it's a question of the number of speakers, Portuguese is by far the most "notable" of those languages. 86.13.184.107 (talk) 09:31, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 24 April 2021
The text as currently written reads:

"In some languages (most notably German), the name upsilon (Ypsilon in German, ípsilon in Portuguese) is used to refer to the Latin letter Y as well as the Greek letter."

As noted in the section above, German is not necessarily the most notable usage, and Portuguese certainly has many more native speakers. I would also note that some other languages refer to Y (in the Latin alphabet) as a "Greek I."

So my suggested edit would be as follows:

In some languages, including German and Portuguese, the name upsilon (Ypsilon in German, ípsilon in Portuguese) is used to refer to the Latin letter Y as well as the Greek letter. In some other languages, the (Latin) Y is referred to as a "Greek I" (i griega in Spanish, i grec in French), also noting its Greek origin. 2003:CA:8738:BEB3:6D4E:B56C:2ADE:44F7 (talk) 10:09, 24 April 2021 (UTC)


 * ✅ Great contribution. Ferkjl (talk) 12:14, 24 April 2021 (UTC)