Ý

Ý (ý) is a letter of the Czech, Icelandic, Faroese, the Slovak, and Turkmen alphabets, as well being used in romanisations of Russian. In Vietnamese it is a y with a high rising tonal diacritic. It was used in Old Norse, Old Castillian, and Old Astur-Leonese. Originally, the letter Ý was formed from the letter Y and acute accent.

Usage

In Icelandic, Ý is the 29th letter of the alphabet, between Y and Þ. It is read as /i/ (short) or /iː/ (long).^[1]

In Turkmen, Ý represents the consonant /j/, as opposed to Y, which represents the vowel sound /ɯ/.^[2]

In Kazakh, Ý was suggested as a letter for the voiced labio-velar approximant (as well as the diphthongs /ʊw/ and /ʉw/); the corresponding Cyrillic letter is У. The 2021 revision proposed the letter U, with the letter U with a macron (Ū) for the U sound in Kazakh.

In the Portuguese Language, the letter was used until 1911 in Portugal and 1947 in Brazil. Ý was used in words like: Proparoxýtona, Caýdos and Fýgo. Ý was later substituted by Í or Ì. Ý was used in words originating from the Greek Language.

In the Czech and Slovak languages it represents a long form of the vowel y and cannot occur in initial position. It is pronounced /iː/, the same as Í; ý used to represent a distinct sound until it merged with the sound of í by the 15th century. Today it is used to distinguish homophones, such as vít (to weave) and výt (to howl) in Czech.^[3]^[4]

In romanizations of the Russian language, Ý is used for Ы́, the letter Ы with a diacritic marking stress.

Other uses

In Vietnamese, Ý means "Italy". The word is a shortened form of Ý Đại Lợi, which comes from Chinese 義大利 (Yìdàlì in Mandarin, a phonetic rendering of the country's name).

Ý does not exist in Modern Spanish, but the letter has survived in the proper name Aýna, a village in Spain, where it is pronounced as [i].^[5] Ý was used in Early Modern Spanish, and it can be observed by some archaic spellings such as the name Ýñigo^[5] for Inigo or by the former spelling ýbamos for "íbamos" in older 16th–18th century Spanish writings.

Character mappings

Character information
Preview	Ý		ý
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH ACUTE		LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH ACUTE
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	221	U+00DD	253	U+00FD
UTF-8	195 157	C3 9D	195 189	C3 BD
Numeric character reference	Ý	Ý	ý	ý
Named character reference	Ý		ý

References

^ "Icelandic alphabet: The Unique Icelandic Letters". Iceland Complete. Archived from the original on 8 May 2016. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
^ Clifton, John M. (2002). "Alphabets of ten Turkic languages". In Clifton, John M.; Clifton, Deborah A. (eds.). Comments on discourse structures in ten Turkic languages (PDF). St. Petersburg, Russia: North Eurasia Group, SIL International. pp. 293–295.
^ "Z historie českého pravopisu" [The history of Czech spelling]. Internetová jazyková příručka (in Czech). Prague: Institute of the Czech Language. 2008–2023. Retrieved 21 August 2023.
^ "Letters i and y / Pronunciation and orthography". slovake.eu. Retrieved 24 August 2023.
^ ^a ^b "Novedades de la Ortografía de la lengua española (2010)" (PDF). Fundéu. 23 November 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2023.