details. The Greek and Latin alphabets developed from the Phoenician form of this early alphabet. Since Late Middle English, the letter Y came to be used in a number of words where earlier Middle English spelling contained the letter yogh (Ȝȝ), which developed from the letter G, ultimately from Semitic gimel – as described below (As a side note - Modern Greek lowercase gamma is somewhat similarly shaped to the lowercase letter ). Vowel The form of the modern letter Y is derived from the Greek letter upsilon. It dates back to the Latin of the first century BC, when upsilon was introduced a second time, this time with its "foot" to distinguish it. It was used to transcribe loanwords from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek, which had the non-Latin vowel sound (as found in modern French cru (raw), or German grün (green)) in words that had been pronounced with in earlier Greek. Because was not a native sound of Latin, Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing it, and it was usually pronounced . Some Latin words of Italic origin also came to be spelled with 'y': Latin silva ('forest') was commonly spelled sylva, in analogy with the Greek cognate and synonym ὕλη. The letter Y was used to represent the sound in the writing systems of some other languages that adopted the Latin alphabet. In Old English and Old Norse, there was a native sound, and so Latin U, Y and I were all used to represent distinct vowel sounds. But, by the time of Middle English, had lost its roundedness and became identical to I ( and ). Therefore, many words that originally had I were spelled with Y, and vice versa. The distinction between and was also lost in later Icelandic and Faroese, making the distinction purely orthographic and historical, but not in the mainland Scandinavian languages, where the distinction is retained. It may be observed that a similar merger of into happened in Greek around the beginning of the 2nd millennium, making the distinction between iota (Ι, ι) and upsilon (Υ, υ) purely a matter of historical spelling there as well. In the West Slavic languages, Y was adapted as a sign for the close central unrounded vowel ; later, merged with in Czech and Slovak, whereas Polish retains it with the pronunciation . Similarly, in Middle Welsh, Y came to be used to designate the