Hungarian ly
Encyclopedia
Ly is a digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

 of the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

, used in Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

.

Usage

Ly is the twentieth letter
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....

 of the Hungarian alphabet
Hungarian alphabet
The Hungarian alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Hungarian language.One sometimes speaks of the smaller and greater Hungarian alphabets, depending on whether or not the letters Q, W, X, Y are listed, which can only be found in foreign words and traditional...

. Its Hungarian name is ellipszilon /ɛlːipsilon/ or elly /ɛjː/ (sometimes spelled ejj). Nowadays it represents the same phoneme /j/ (palatal approximant
Palatal approximant
The palatal approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is '...

) as the Hungarian letter j, but historically it represented the different phoneme /ʎ/ (palatal lateral approximant
Palatal lateral approximant
The palatal lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a rotated lowercase letter ⟨y⟩ , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is L.-Features:Features of the palatal lateral...

).

It is used this way only in Hungarian. In Hungarian, even if two characters are put together to make a different sound, they are considered one letter, and even acronyms keep the letter intact.

The combination lj (considered two separate letters, L and J) is also common in Hungarian, and is in fact pronounced /ʎ/ by many speakers. However, even this is sometimes subject to the same reduction to /j/ that ly has been, mainly if it is at the end of a word.

History

Originally the digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

 letter ly was used to represent the palatal lateral /ʎ/, just like the digraph letter ny
Hungarian ny
Ny is a digraph in a number of languages such as Catalan, Hungarian, Malay, and Ganda. In most of these languages, including all of the ones named above, it denotes the palatal nasal ....

is still used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/. However, in the eastern dialects, as well as in the standard dialect, the phoneme /ʎ/ lost its lateral feature and merged with /j/ (this process is akin to Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 yeísmo
Yeísmo
Yeísmo is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, which consists of the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme and its merger into the phoneme , usually realized as a palatal fricative or affricate. In other words, ‹ll› and ‹y› represent the same sound...

); this way, the Hungarian letter ly came to be pronounced the same as the Hungarian letter j. In the western dialects, /ʎ/ lost its palatal feature and merged with /l/ (alveolar lateral approximant
Alveolar lateral approximant
The alveolar lateral approximant, also known as clear l, is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is l.As a...

). In the northern dialects, the phoneme /ʎ/ has been preserved.

The digraph ly was also used for the sound /ʎ/ in Croatian alphabet, before Gaj's Latin Alphabet was introduced.

Examples

These examples are Hungarian words that use the letter ly, with the English translation following.
  • furulya = flute
    Flute
    The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...

  • amelyet = which (accusative)
  • helyi = local
  • golyó = ball
  • lyuk = hole
  • kehely = goblet
  • folyó = river
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