MannaFest

Greek Roots · letter 20 of 24

Upsilon

The fork in the road — and the letter of “Son.”

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician waw — a hook or tent peg.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

The hook opened into a fork — the second, later use Greek made of waw.

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

A rounded u made at the front of the mouth — the French u, or German ü. English has no such vowel, which is why the letter is transliterated sometimes u and sometimes y.

Written y (u) in scholarly books.

Its number

400

it is letter 20 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

“bare u” — a later Greek label

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician waw, borrowed a second time

Likely

Upsilon is where the borrowed alphabet stops and the Greek one begins. The letters up to tau came from Phoenicia in order; everything from here was appended by Greeks, at the end, in a block.

Its shape gave the ancient world a favourite picture. The Y forks: one stem, two branches, and you must take one. Greek and Roman writers called it the letter of Pythagoras and used it for the choice between the easy road and the hard one — an image the Bible has its own version of, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

Son — and “Son of Man”

Huios is the ordinary word for a son, and the New Testament uses it 377 times. Two of those uses carry most of the weight: “Son of God,” and the title Jesus overwhelmingly prefers for himself, “the Son of Man” — which sounds modest in English and is not, because it comes straight out of Daniel 7, where the one like a son of man is given everlasting dominion.

Two roads, two gates

The Sermon on the Mount ends with a fork: a wide gate and a broad road, a narrow gate and a hard one. The image is older than Christianity and was common in the ancient world — which is part of why Jesus could use it without explaining it.

Endurance is not patience

Hypomonē is made of two pieces: “under” and “remain.” It is not a placid temperament; it is staying put under weight. English “patience” is too mild for it, and “perseverance” is closer.

Words that begin here

υἱός

huios — son

377 occurrences — and the first half of Jesus' own favourite title.

Open the word→

ὑπομονή

hypomonē — endurance

Literally “remaining under.” Staying put while the weight is on.

Open the word→

ὑπακοή

hypakoē — obedience

Built from “hear” — obedience as listening that goes all the way through to doing.

Open the word→

How readers have read this letter

✧The letter of Pythagorasa reading

Ancient writers treated the Y as a picture of the moral life: you come up the stem as a child, and at the fork you choose. The Roman satirist Persius calls it “the letter that spread the Samian branches,” and Lactantius, a Christian writing around AD 300, uses the same image for the two roads set before a soul.

It is a genuinely ancient reading, and it is a reading of a shape — the Y forks because of how Greek scribes drew a vowel, not because anyone designed a parable into it.

Read this way by: Persius, Satires III; Lactantius, Divine Institutes VI.3 — both public domain