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Front rounded vowels are somewhat uncommon. If we focus on the high front rounded vowel /y/ and consider cases where it was lost, it seems most likely to shift to /i/ by losing its rounding or to shift to /u/ by changing its backness than it is to shift to any other vowel.

I find /y/ more acoustically similar to /u/ than to /i/. However, I can think of one example of the sound change /y/ > /i/ off the top of my head, namely Greek, but no examples of the sound change /y/ > /u/.

My question is twofold:

  • Are there known instances of the sound change /y/ > /u/?
  • Is the sound change /y/ > /i/ actually more common than /y/ > /u/?

The immediate motivation for this question is personal experience. I'm trying to square my intuition that /y/ > /i/ is probably a way more common change than /y/ > /u/ with the observation that /y/ sounds much closer to /u/ in real life than it does to /i/.

I have studied French and Mandarin to some degree, both of which have the /y/ phoneme. For me, at least, the /y/ sound in both these languages sounds much, much more like /u/ than it does like /i/.

I speak California English natively, so I guess my normal /u/ sound is fairly front.

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    English also had y > i (English "feet" ~ German Füße), but front rounded vowels are rare enough that I can't think of any other examples of them disappearing off the top of my head.
    – Draconis ♦
    Oct 16, 2022 at 5:47
  • In both Icelandic and Faroese, /y(ː)/ has also become /ɪ ~ iː/ and /i ~ ʊɪ/, respectively, though in Icelandic a new /y/ has developed secondarily from /ʏ/ before /jɪ/, so hugi is /hyːjɪ/, while hygi would be /hɪːjɪ/. It’s fairly common in various Southern Chinese dialects for /y/ to merge with /i/ as well.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Oct 16, 2022 at 9:15
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    Your native /u/ being the fairly fronted diphthong that most variants of English possess is likely the reason you find /y/ closer to /u/. People who speak languages that have ‘plain’ /u i/ but no /y/, such as Spanish speakers, generally hear and produce /y/ as /i/. — But do bear in mind that /y/ is often historically related to/comes from to /u/ within a language (e.g., virtually all cases of /y/ in Germanic languages are from umlauted /u/, French /y/ is the default outcome of /u/, Fenno-Ugric and Turkic /y/ pairs with /u/ in vowel harmony, etc.).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Oct 16, 2022 at 11:18
  • @Draconis Greek also lost its front rounded vowels (upsilon being classically /y/, and oi likely going through a mid front rounded stage) merging them all into /i/
    – Tristan
    Oct 17, 2022 at 8:44
  • @Tristan That one’s mentioned in the question, though.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Oct 17, 2022 at 22:04

1 Answer 1

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In Uzbek, Proto-Turkic *ü > u, e.g.:

Proto-Turkic *üč (“three”) > Uzbek uch /utʃ/
Proto-Turkic *kün (“day”) > Uzbek kun
Proto-Turkic *yǖŕ (“face”) > Uzbek yuz

From among some two dozen Turkic languages that have ever existed, Uzbek seems to be the only one with that change being consistent, which is evidence of the rarity of that phenomenon.

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