Why Y is pronounced as "igrek"
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The last time I heard it pronounced as “igrek” was in middle school trigonometry class in Russia. Which was roughly 15 years ago. The only context i’ve ever heard it pronounced that way in ever was in russian math classes.
Still not sure why I am bringing it up, but thanks for the post, legitimately appreciated.
Our language usually reads chars as we write them so it is completely, totally out of touch to spell it "waai". Not tha t "igrek" makes any sense, but that is the name of the char...
And whatever word I explain how to write in english, Y will be "igrek". Because it is simple to understand. If I'd say "waay" when talking my native language, I'd just waste my time and will have to fall back to "igrek"
(Edit: I'm also learning quite a bit from the comments! "igrek" seems more common than I realized, and the american / english "why" pronunciation I grew up with may be the outlier!)
This thread has been a personal goldmine for me, as this just unlocked another memory lol.
When our elementary school started english classes, and we got an assignment to memorize the alphabet, I was getting help with that from my dad.
The twist was that he didn’t learn english in school, because during his time in school (less than a decade before USSR fell apart), kids were taught either french or german. He took both french and german at different points in time. And due to no internet and my less-than-perfect notes in class, pronunciation of some letters had to be “reverse-engineered”[0].
We didn’t make the mistake with W, because of that whole “double-u double-u double-u, tochka [aka dot], <the rest of the URL>” thing you hear on TV and elsewhere all the time when a website link is mentioned. But for V, I indeed got a bit embarrassed by learning it wrong and pronouncing it as “veh/vay” when reciting it in front of the class.
0. No internet access at the time, and english literacy among the population in our small city (that even most russian people have never even heard of, and if they did, still having zero knowledge about it) was pretty much non-existent at the time. Our republic (kind of an equivalent of a US state or an autonomous territory like Puerto Rico) had more than enough language-related problems to worry about already at the time to even bother with english at all, like the eternal fight over the importance/dominance of russian vs. tatar language. Which spilled into a lot of aspects of life, including politicians, parents, and schools having shitfights over legally mandated number of hours schools should dedicate to russian vs. tatar language classes.
As you can guess these villagers will hate you with passion for not allowing a single letter city name in your address form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y,_Somme
https://www.tf1info.fr/societe/video-insolite-bienvenue-a-y-...
* In the US system, a CDP is lower ranking than a town or village... basically it's an inhabited place few people that isn't large enough to have a local government.
(just like in English "C" is pronounced differently than it normally in words, where it usually is the same as "k").
And when I say generally, I mean unlike what we do in every word appearing in the sentence "un guai Hun fou de kung fu et de guns qui bugua dans un pub en ayant y quis de l’eau."
;)
(And France being a major power at the time that math and science developed quickly, with French as a "lingua ...franca" for a large area of the world, helped carry the name to some science domains too).
Fun fact—lingua franca is often assumed to refer to French, because French was the most prominent lingua franca until English, but it actually originally referenced a pidgin (mostly simplified Italian) used for trade in the eastern Mediterranean. At the time people in the East often referred to all Western Europeans as Franks, so lingua franca mostly meant "the language used by westerners".
So the French name for Y is basically “Greek I” but you say it like “eee-greck”.
So in Spanish it basically means "greek e"? Nuts.
I speak dutch and I don't understand why in Unicode a special character for IJ exists.
I and J are separate letters on Dutch keyboards and typewriters.
If you write them by hand, it's exactly the same as when you write an i followed by a j.
I could understand that a ligature in some fonts could exist, but not why a Unicode character does.
Also, there are many such Dutch sounds made by two letters (ei, eu, ou, oe, etc...) and those don't get their own Unicode character either (and that's good). There's nothing special about ij I see that makes that one warrant different treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)#Ligatures_i...
In Dutch when handwriting you just write an o followed by an e as you always would, while in French you really learn a different symbol when handwriting it and I wouldn't be surprised there are French words with an o followed by an e without using œ [edit, found one: moelle].
In Dutch crossword puzzles for example the IJ takes up a single square but others such as OE or UI are not.
Bin
Gym
Not to mention:
Receive: ei People: eo See: ee Sea: ea Believe: ie
It was one of several "i" sounding vowels (like english has: i as in bin, e as in be, y as in gym, etc, roughly sounding the same).
"Y" has "i psilon" meaning "high i" (literal) or "slim/bare i" (referring to how it was pronounced).
Or say, “Not the usual I, but the ooh I” enough times and the end sounds like Y. (Warning: I am not a linguist.)