Ÿ
Latin letter Y with diaeresis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ÿ is a Latin script character composed of the letter ⟨y⟩ and the diaeresis diacritical mark. (An uppercase form, Ÿ, has a codepoint in some coding schemes (including Unicode) but is not known to be used in any orthography.[citation needed])
- Ÿ ÿ
| Y with diaeresis | |
|---|---|
| Ÿ ÿ | |
 | |
| Usage | |
| Type | alphabetic |
| Language of origin | Tlingit language, Welsh language, Paunaka language, Cocama language |
| History | |
| Development | Y y
|
| Other | |
| Writing direction | left-to-right |
Usage
It occurs in French as a variant of ⟨ï⟩ in a few proper nouns, as in the name of the Parisian suburb of L'Haÿ-les-Roses (French pronunciation: [laj le ʁoz] ⓘ) and in the surname of the house of Croÿ [kʁu.i].[1]
It occurs in a few Hungarian names as well, such as Lajos Méhelÿ and Margit Danÿ.
In Tlingit, ÿ represented the sound [ɰ], but is not used today as the sound has merged with [j] and [w].[citation needed]
In Paunaka, this letter represents the vowel [ɨ].[2]
The Cocama language also uses this letter.[3]
IPA uses ⟨ÿ⟩ to transcribe the close central compressed vowel, a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages.
The character has also found use as a metal umlaut.
In Unicode
- U+00FF ÿ LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS
- U+0178 Ÿ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS
The lowercase ÿ has the Unicode code U+00FF, or 255, making it often appear when binary files are opened as text files.
As a diaeresis is never used on the first letter of a word and all-caps text typically omitted all accents, there was assumed to be no need for an uppercase ⟨Ÿ⟩ when computer character sets such as CP437 and ISO 8859-1 were designed. However much software assumes that conversion from lower-case to upper-case and then back again is lossless, so ⟨Ÿ⟩ was added to many character sets such as CP1252, ISO 8859-15, and Unicode. This phenomenon also arose for the German eszett ⟨ß⟩.
