Y?

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

In AD8-0031 Jan Wickham in Australia (why do they spell it with an Aus instead
of an Oz?) mentions that the Italian language has no 'y', as I believe someone
else had remarked earlier. This is true, but it also has no 'J', which did not
stop either Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia or Ferrari from using the services of the
native Italian engineer Vittorio Jano. I have heard that his family name had
come originally from Yugoslavia, which is sometimes spelled Jugoslavia, and I
expect few Italians would not know to pronounce either "Iugoslavia", although
I don't know how they do in fact spell it.

 I don't know whether it is true in Italy (or Australia) but in the USA some
commercial people feel that an alien spelling may confer a special exotic
status to a product. A popular premium ice-cream here, Haagen Daasz, has
imaginary Danish-looking diacritical marks arbitrarily placed over letters
where the entrepreneur who invented the name thought they looked the best; and
where I live there is a hot-dog shop called "Wiener Wurkz" which similarly has
umlauts over a couple of the consonants. I suspect it is in that spirit that
spider/spyder was used in the first place, and in that spirit that some more
pretentious makes chose to use the 'y' while Alfa quite deliberately chose the
more direct 'i'. That is only a guess, but it goes with the values which I
associated with the corporate culture of Alfa Romeo SpA.

 John H.

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