when was the letter "Y" first used?

Question

I would like to know when the letter or symbol 'Y' was first used.

Answer 1

I'm not sure "came from the Greek alphabet" is very helpful, since that is the indirect source of the Roman alphabet in general. But the point that it was a later and direct borrowing from Greek is an important part of the story.
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There are major hints about the history of the letter Y in its POSITION in the alphabet, and in the NAME many European languages use for it.

Both of these hint that these were additions to the oldest forms of the Roman alphabet.

The ORDER of letters --

The order of the letters after T (the original end of the alphabet in the ancient Semitic parent of our alphabet) shows us the historical order in which these letters were added to (or added back into) the Latin/European alphabet, since it was a common practice for both the Greek & Latin alphabets to add "new" letters (even if they were old ones "re-borrowed" for a new use) to the END of the alphabet. (The only real "exceptions" to this are letters that "split", and whose variations were listed together in the alphabet, viz., I-J and U-V-W, which were originally just two letters. These variations are MUCH later --from medieval and Renaissance periods [the latter for J].)

Note: U (and its variants V and later W) and X were not original Semitic letters, but WERE early letters in form of the Greek alphabet which (through Etruscan) was the basis for the earliest Roman alphabet of the 7th century BC. Y and Z were added fairly early, but had a special use -- to write words taken from GREEK. (Actually K was used in the same way. Latin words with our /k/ sound used the letter C [which indicated TWO sounds at first, but then "G" was created for one of them... note that Latin "c" NEVER made the "s" sound... this is a much later development]. )
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm

THe NAME of the letter Y -

It was called "Y Græca" or 'Greek u' to distinguish it from the native Latin /u/ sound. Compare the Romance language names "i grec", "i griega", or simply "grec" and the German name "üppsilon" (the latter taken directly from the Greek name, which happens to mean "simple u" in Greek). Here is another evidence of the special use of these letter for WORDS taken from Greek. (This, by the way, can be a helpful hint of the GREEK origins of various Latin words we find in English. When "y" is found as a vowel in the middle of a word it often goes back through Latin to Greek, e.g., "myth" goes back to Greek "mythos" (or "muthos", if you prefer").)

Exactly when the Romans added these letters is not clear to me -- certainly by the time of the Roman Empire (beginning in the 1st century BC), Y and Z were part of their alphabet.

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A bit more on "Z" (for comparison) and Latin letter-naming:

On both the order and naming issues, compare the letter "Z".
Not only is at tacked on at the very end of the alphabet. It's name in most European languages --including British English-- is based on the GREEK name "zeta" --thus we have "tsett", "zed", etc.

The names 'Greek u' and "zeta" are themselves indicators that these two letters were NOT in the original Latin alphabet. That is why the names themselves do not follow the usual Latin pattern.

Explanation: The ORIGINAL Latin alphabet (of the Romans) adopted a different system of naming the letters from that used by the Greeks. The Greeks had a complex system of naming, beginning by simply using the Semitic names --borrowing them from the Phoenicians along with the letters themselves (though in Semitic languages the names were actual words; in Greek they were nonsense )-- then creating some of their own Greek names (like "epsilon", literally "simple e", "omega" -"big o", "omicron" -"little o") and FINALLY added some letter names based simply on the sound the letter made + a vowel sound to make it pronounceable. The Romans used that FINAL system from the very beginning -- which explains why English (and most European languages, using the Latin form of the alphabet) mostly uses this simple pattern. (Note that American English "zee" was from the British dialect of one group of American colonists, using one of MANY different names the letter was called by. Modern British "zed" shows us the ORIGIN of the letter in Greek; American "zee" adopts the standard letter-naming pattern of our alphabet.)


Some dislike wikipedia, but many of its articles are solid, and summarize material well. Here are a few that should help with this question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_letters#Basic_alphabet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet#Evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_alphabet#Origins

Answer 2

Historically, the letter Y came from the Greek alphabet, later adopted as you now see by Rome into their Latin lettering.
Non-historically, the first use of the Y letter was to include it on a word identifying agreement. At one time, nodding the head was universally used to agree. Some people long ago considered nodding disrespectful and verbalized the word "es" to mean agreement. Hundreds of fights broke out at the verbal word of agreement then in misunderstanding, believing they were being called an "@s" until one unidentified ancestor, afraid to be beaten up if he uttered the agreement word, furiously nodded his head in agreement until he got a crick in his neck and yelled a "yipe". The "yee" sound was added to the "es" sound and it became the universally accepted word of agreement, yes. True? Maybe not but at least it sounds good. Yes?

Answer 3

Y would You ask such an unusual question?
It was first used when some clumsy kid broke one side off an X...hence the new letter being called Y...his mama said "Y did you break the X?" He claimed he did not break the X ... initiating the new phrase "Y Not?"

Answer 4

History Of The Letter Y