XYSYTHRUS, according to the Chaldean historian Berosus, was king of Babylon at the time of the deluge. ' In the fragments of the history which have been preserved by Eusebius, it is said that many people of different tribes dwelt together on the plain of Shiner, without laws and in a barbarous manner; that a god appeared among them from the Persian gulf and taught them the arts of civilization; that thus Babylon was built and reigned over by 10 kings, the last of whom was Xysythrus; that he, warned of a coming deluge, built a ship in which he was saved; that when the waters retired the ship stranded on the mountains of Koordistan, and the king, going out of it, built an altar, offered sacrifices, and disappeared in the clouds. There is said to be a striking resemblance in many important features between this narrative of Berosus and that of Moses, and between them both and that translated by George Smith from the cunei form inscriptions in the British museum.
last letter but one of the English alphabet, is derived from the Greek y (v). It had no place in the earlier Latin alphabet, and only came into use by Roman 9 writers in the time of Cicero in spelling words borrowed from the Greek. In the Greek of the classical age, v (y) no longer retained its pristine power (Ital. u or Eng. ao), but had degenerated into a sound like the French u, or even nearer to i (ee); it could not therefore be represented by the Roman 24 or a, which had remained (and remains yet in modern Italian) undegenerated, and thus was appended to the Roman alphabet as a new character. Its use in native Latin words, as sylva for slice, satyra for satira, is an
error of modern editors. Italian has no y, but uses i instead, as sinfonia, symphony. The other modern languages of Europe have not only retained it in spelling words of Greek origin, but some of them substitute it for i in native words, generally in a very capricious manner. German orthography has recently been purged of this abuse; and in Dutch, where it had always the sound of English i (at), the double character ij is now written. In English it is used to represent the semi-consonantal power of i or j (see I and .1) in the beginning of a word and before another vowel, as yoke = Lat. iugum or jugum = Ang.-Sax. iuc.; young = Ang.-Sax. long = Ger. jung. It has been suggested that the practice of writing y at the end of a word instead of i, while we replace it by i on adding a syllable (e.g., lovely, lovelier), may have arisen like the habit of giving a tail to the last unit of the Roman numerals (e.g. ij, iiij), in the wish to give a kind of finish to the word and please the eye. The would-be antique spelling y', yt, for the, that, is a blunder, arising from mistaking the Ang.-Sax. (= th) for a y.