Alphabet That Uses Yumlaut

A little typographical quiz: what alphabet uses the glyph ÿ?

Welsh?

Doesn't Welsh use a "y-carat", that isn't available?

No, w-circumflex. Which isn't available in iso8859-1, indeed.

: Welsh is correct according to http://www.ask-group.com/publish/welshalph.htm

God knows where that page got its ideas from. Welsh doesn't use anything like that many accented characters.

: Apparently Welsh does use all those accents, and more - though infrequently. See http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?lang=cy+Welsh&imgonly=on&script=latin for examples of words with each possible combination of acute/grave/circumflex/diaeresis with a/e/i/o/u/w/y.

Dutch, and it isn't really a y-umlaut; it's an i plus a j. -- GarethMcCaughan

No, it's not Dutch. There is, as you say, an ij ligature in the Dutch alphabet. When lower case in cursive it looks a lot like ÿ, (actually, more like ü with a tail) but in roman it is always ij.

Turkish.

Not according to http://www.turkishlingua.com/alphabet.html

In Turkish alphabet, there are two separate letters i and I. And also their lowercase and uppercase, I with a dot, and i without a dot. That letter is actually lowercase of I, as it's seen in western character sets (Also, it means there's a character-set problem for Turkish programmers)

He could have been thinking of öy, which does.

The Unicode Consortium lists ÿ (in the Latin-1 Supplement block) as code point U+00FF, LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIARESIS, and states that it appears in French. This comes from http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf.

See also U+0178 (in the Latin Extended-A block), LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIARESIS, which appears in French and Igbo (a Nigerian language). Refer to http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf.

I have checked; I don't know of any french words with a ÿ or its capitalized version. Perhaps this is a holdover from the Old French. -- EricJablow

According to Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style (a wonderful book, by the way),

: The ÿ is a vowel sometimes used in archaic French and still required in the modern forms of a few personal names and place names. It is also an alternate form of the ij ligature in Flemish and Dutch.

Example: http://us.imdb.com/Name?von+O%FF,+Jenna -- She pronounces it like the letters "O-Y", which is less fun than how I'd imagined it.

ÿ is used in the language of the Sami (Lapps) in northern Scandinavia.

ÿ is used in the name of a French town near Paris : L'Haÿ-les-Roses. You can also find Rue des Cloÿs in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. Unfortunately, there is no &Yuml; in ISO-Latin-1. -- GP

One of the more comman personal names in which ÿ is used is Ysaÿe, as in Eugène Ysaÿe (see http://www.web-helper.net/PDMusic/Biographies/YsayeEugene/default.asp). -- PaulHoffman

I have attempted to repair this page by replacing Latin-1 encodings with their UTF-8 counterparts, since that seems to be what c2.com reports. Please revert my change if I just torpedoed the page. Thank you. ♥

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