(22-04-2026, 04:50 PM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Exactly my thoughts. Even though modern day French (and Picard) seem to pronounce word-initial y exclusively with the "soft" /j/ sound whereas word-initial j with "harder" /ʒ/ (resp. /d͡ʒ/) sounds, I think it's certainly plausible for some medieval scribes to have abused the y=i interchangeability, extending it to word-initial positions as well, especially back then when orthography was far from standardized. Thus, /ʒo'lɛt/ /d͡ʒol'lɛt/ or some variation of that could have been rendered iollet jollet or yollet, all three pronounced the same, unlike nowadays where yollet would definitely be read /jo'lɛt/
I don't know if the pronunciation was different than it is now, but in writing of medieval Latin and French they sometimes replaced "i" with "y" (more often the first letter) inconsistently, meaninglessly, especially in uncommon words (so they looked more exotic? IDK) like this "ydolorum": You are not allowed to view links.
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They didn't write any "j" at all except as a last "i" in "ij", a very consistent writing convention, not a letter: you can't find any other "j" in manuscripts. Transcriptions often "modernize" medieval Latin and French by replacing "i" with "j" using modern conventions that didn't exist at the time. A capital "J" in manuscripts is actually a curved "I". Latin set the standard and since the alphabet didn't have anything between "i" and "k", it was not possible to write a letter "j" that didn't exist yet in French or Latin. The custom of writing "j" for a phonetic reason in French and Latin didn't really catch until centuries later. It may have started in German first, then Italian in the 16th century.
The question would be if they'd also replace a consonant "i" by "y". It feels like you'd only do it when "i" is a vowel, as in your "ydolorum" example.
(23-04-2026, 11:38 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The question would be if they'd also replace a consonant "i" by "y". It feels like you'd only do it when "i" is a vowel, as in your "ydolorum" example.
I found a curious example yesterday of a transcript of correspondance from Gaspar Schets (born in antwerp, died in bergen/mons). I, J, and Y seem to be used in all positions. The correspondance is in french. You are not allowed to view links.
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"je me recommande" is at the beginning of every letter, and sometimes is "ye me recommande".
In one letter, as an example, starts with
"ye me recommande"
[
attachment=15267]
"yai rechu par ce porteur"
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Uses y for i in "yl ny a point"
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"vous dites byen"
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Across his correspondance, month names are also slightly unusual, with "Yanuir", both "Yuing"
and "Juing", "Yulet".
So across everything, Y was used as ʒ, and as a vowel in any position within a word. As this is a transcription, it's possible that J and y was confused, but considering that y is also found in the middle of words, and that y, j and i are all transcribed in various places I imagine that in those situations the letter
looked like a y, regardless of what it really was.
(23-04-2026, 11:38 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The question would be if they'd also replace a consonant "i" by "y". It feels like you'd only do it when "i" is a vowel, as in your "ydolorum" example.
I checked in the transcription (not "modernized" to classical Latin) of the You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.: the river Jordan is fluuius iordanis, Jesse (father of king David) is yesse, but Jesus is i(h)esu(s) and Jerusalem is ierusalem. Go figure...
Typical medieval Latin spellings. I've seen iherusalem elsewhere. They didn't like "ie", preferred "ihe" and "ye". They also didn't like "mn" so they wrote "mpn" instead: sompnus, dampnatus, ...
Many seemingly random y/i substitutions:
tytulus
hystoriis
ydola egipti
ymaginem
moyses (Moses)
symonem syrenensem (Simon of Cyrene)
...
(23-04-2026, 12:38 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They also didn't like "mn" so they wrote "mpn" instead: sompnus, dampnatus, ...
To make an "mn" sound one must close the lips during the "m" then open them for the "n". That is similar to how one forms the "p" sound. So maybe people did pronounce or hear a "p" there.
Quote:Many seemingly random y/i substitutions:
tytulus
hystoriis
ydola egipti
ymaginem
moyses (Moses)
symonem syrenensem (Simon of Cyrene)
...
In some of those the "y" seems to be marking the stressed syllable ("
Idola" rather than "id
Ola").
In others (like "ymaginem", "Moyses" and "Symon") the "y" was used perhaps because those are "foreign" words that came into Latin from or through Greek. I gather that "y" (like "k") was used in Roman times only for words of Greek origin; is that so?
All the best, --stolfi
Absolutely, in many cases the use of "y" is associated with the Greekness of the word. It's called "Greek i" in many languages. This might also be at play in spellings like "yezuz".
This usage feels different from whatever may have caused "yong" though.