F66r question

[-JKP-]

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It blew my mind to visit the Netherlands, and learn that in Dutch, y is traditionally regarded as a variation of ij. Sometimes it's written ÿ in order to draw attention to this equivalence. As a result, the estuary in the center of Amsterdam, the IJ, is in the running for the world's shortest place name, since it can be written as Ÿ. (It pretty much never is, though.) I noticed that the ÿ in the alphabet JKP posted is dotted, which I would think could be a big clue in placing it historically. To anyone's knowledge, does the equivalence y = ÿ = ij = ii = ī = 2 (in Roman numerals) extend beyond the Netherlands in the late Middle Ages?

If you spend a lot of time looking at manuscripts, you will understand quite quickly how ij and ÿ evolved together. We can see it in the way scribes write it and how it changes over time.

It is also related to ii at the end of a word. Often, when you see ij in medieval script, it is not ij but rather a long-i at the end (i with a tail) to indicate that it is the end of the word, the same way long-n (n with a descender) and long-m were written. So... if you wrote "ii" at the end of the word the first "i" looks like "i" and the second one looks like "j" because it is a terminal-i with a lengthened tail. Since they both have dots, many scribes wrote it like ÿ. I have hundreds of examples.

This also applies to Roman numerals. What looks like iiij represents 4. The end-tail is simply a terminal form of the character. Most languages did not have "y". Middle English had a shape that resembles "y" but the sound "y" was closer to the way yogh was pronounced (which looks more like z or 3).