It ' s a very complicated story mainly , it ' s to do with the fact that languages change and evolve all the time . The shape of our letter Y in fact comes from the Greek letter . In Ancient Greek it was pronounced like the u in put , but in modern Greek it is pronounced like the ee in see . During the Classical Greek period , though , it was pronounced halfway between those two sounds . It ' s a sound that doesn ' t occur in English , but it ' s the sound of the French u , or the sound of the German . In fact , in German , the letter y is still pronounced that way in words of Greek origin so the German word Mythos is pronounced as if spelled Mtos , and is still called Ypsilon pronounced psilon . When Latin started borrowing words from Greek , they also adopted the letter Y to represent that sound a sound that didn ' t actually exist in Latin . It was , remember , halfway between an oo represented in Latin by the letter u and an ee represented in Latin by the letter i . Educated people tried to pronounce it correctly , but the nearest they could get was oo most people went the other way and pronounced it ee and that ' s the pronunciation that we have inherited . So while the Germans pronounce the y in Mythos in a way that closely resembles the original Greek , we don ' t have that sound , so we pronounce myth as mith . The word hubris we have chosen to pronounce with the oo sound instead , and we actually have a free choice as to whether we want to spell it phonetically as hubris , or historically accurately as hybris . Since French descended from Latin , it also has the ee sound for y . In the French alphabet , y is called igrec , which translates as Greek i . In the Slavic languages , the Greek upsilon was pronounced with the oo pronunciation so in the Crillic alphabet used by some Slavic languages , such as Russian , their version of U is so Putin , for example , is spelled .