4 ms·

The character '鉞' is not commonly used in modern Chinese. I would seriously doubt that anyone teaching Chinese would use this word to illustrate the letter 'Y'

• thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Well, more to the point, someone teaching Chinese would be unlikely to think that illustrating a particular letter was a concept that made any sense. Pinyin is a syllabic system, not an alphabetic system. For example, the letter Y in the syllable "yue" is notionally silent -- making it an especially terrible choice of something to illustrate! -- and "yue" could appear in the same row of a pinyin table as "wu", since they both start with the same consonant (or, more accurately, neither of them starts with a consonant at all). But Y in "yang" is not silent; it represents the same sound you'd expect if you were familiar with English. By the same token, "i" represents a very different vowel in "shi" than it does in "ni". And interestingly enough, although "ni" rhymes with "xi" and doesn't rhyme with "shi", the traditional analysis says that "xi" and "shi" use the same vowel (again, it's supposed to be a lack of a vowel, not a vowel that exists) while "ni" is doing something that is somehow different. Modern analysis would disagree with the traditional claim about vowels, but can support the idea that "yue" and "wu" both begin with a zero onset.