
That's neither Greek nor phonetic. It's a mistaken and misleading Romanization of a word whose original spelling isn't even in this alphabet, and whose pronunciation is not what that spelling looks like to modern English-speakers. Spelled phonetically in the Latin alphabet (ours), it would have a "u", not a "y", because the sound is actually more like in "flu" or "flew", not "fly". Spelled in the Greek alphabet, which the letter "y" was meant to evoke to Latin audiences because their established familiar alphabet had no such letter, the whole word would look different, not just one letter.smsgtmac wrote:I've adopted the late, great, Professor J. Rufus Fears' convention of using the Greek phonetic spelling of 'Hybris'.
The letter "y" was a late addition to the Roman alphabet, based on the Greek letter upsilon, the equivalent of Latin "u". It was entirely redundant to "u", representing exactly the same sound, and had no use in Latin spelling other than in the transliteration of Greek names & terms to make them look more foreign and exotic, like the fake-foreign elements in the modern English name "Häagen-Dazs". Later, when the letter "y" was established as part of the Latin alphabet but its sound-value shifted so it wasn't the same as "u" anymore, any word from earlier times that kept it would get mispronounced (like "hyper/hypo", which were pronounced "huper/hupo" originally, before the pronunciation got influenced by the lingering "y"-spelling), and any whose original pronunciations were preserved needed to use "u" for that phonetic spelling (like "hubris").
Of course, that got further complicated by the modern English habit of pronouncing "u" as "yu" even in words that weren't like that originally, but the fact remains that just replacing "u" with "y" in a word of ancient Greek origin does not make the spelling either Greek or phonetic.