Upsilon (;[1] [2] uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; Greek, Modern (1453-);: {{linktext|ύψιλον ýpsilon in Greek, Modern (1453-); pronounced as /ˈipsilon/) or ypsilon is the twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: Υʹ|label=none has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw .
The name of the letter was originally just "υ" (y; also called hy, hence "hyoid", meaning "shaped like the letter υ"), but the name changed to "υ ψιλόν" u psilon 'plain υ' to distinguish it from οι, which had come to have the same pronounced as /[y]/ pronunciation.[3]
In early Attic Greek (6th century BCE), it was pronounced pronounced as /link/ (a close back rounded vowel like the English "long o͞o").[4] [5] In Classical Greek, it was pronounced pronounced as /link/ (a close front rounded vowel), at least until 1030.[6] In Modern Greek, it is pronounced pronounced as /pronounced as /link//; in the digraphs and, as pronounced as /[f]/ or pronounced as /[v]/; and in the digraph as pronounced as /[u]/. In ancient Greek, it occurred in both long and short versions, but Modern Greek does not have a length distinction.
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-).
Upsilon participated as the second element in falling diphthongs, which have subsequently developed in various ways.
The usage of Y in Latin dates back to the first century BC. It was used to transcribe loanwords from Greek, so it was not a native sound of Latin and was usually pronounced pronounced as //u// or pronounced as //i//. The latter pronunciation was the most common in the Classical period and was used mostly by uneducated people. The Roman Emperor Claudius proposed introducing a new letter into the Latin alphabet to transcribe the so-called sonus medius (a short vowel before labial consonants), but in inscriptions, the new letter was sometimes used for Greek upsilon instead.
Four letters of the Latin alphabet arose from it: and U, Y and, much later, V and W. In the Cyrillic script, the letters U (У, у) and izhitsa (Ѵ, ѵ) arose from it.
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.
\Upsilon
Upsilon is known as Pythagoras' letter, or the Samian letter, because Pythagoras used it as an emblem of the path of virtue or vice.[9] As the Roman writer Persius wrote in Satire III:Lactantius, an early Christian author (ca. 240 – ca. 320), refers to this:
These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.