Saluete! I’ve been wondering, how did the Romans tend to pronounce ‘y’? My guess was that the sound would tend towards the ‘i’, and away from the ‘u’, if they did not in fact pronounce the üpsilon with its correct, Greek value. Anyone know what the Romans liked to do?
Y was used only in Greek words, introduced late second century BC, so it’s pronunciation was the Koine Greek “ü” (sounds like German “u umlaut”), and vey soon became “i”.
What about sylua?
That “y” probably sounded as “i”. My dictionary says “sylua” is the misspelled form of “silua”, and it cites “Bréal and Bailly” to corroborate.
How do you “mispell” with a ‘y’?
The Greek letter upsilon was only pronounced as a front-rounded vowel (German ü-umlaut, or French ‘u’) in the Attic dialect of Greek (it is wrong to call it the Koine pronunciation of upsilon), and then only until approximately the 1st or 2nd century AD. Most other contemporary dialects pronounced upsilon as a back rounded vowel, which is probably why early Roman linguistic borrowings from their Doric neighbors represent the Greek upsilon as “u” in the Latin alphabet. Introducing the upsilon into the Latin alphabet as a “y” was a late, pedantic innovation in order to represent the front-rounded upsilon of the more proper Attic dialect, which lacked an equivalent in the Latin alphabet. Unfortunately with the disappearance of that pronounciation very soon after the introduction of the “y” into the Latin alphabet, the distinction between “y” and “i” (after Koine something like 13 originally distinct vowels and diphthongs all merged into the sound “i”) was lost and the ensuing havoc on Roman orthography, mostly due to linguistic hypercorrection, still affects spelling to this day (e.g. English “stylus” and “sylvan”).
Nescio. You’d have to ask “Bréal and Bailly”. 
Fascinating. What then would be your overall solution?
Nescio. You’d have to ask “Bréal and Bailly”.
Haha, touché.