[thrdbndndn]

I'm confused too.

Their posts brought up two points:

1. Y might be for yellow than axe.

-- I agree but that remains a theory.

2. The designer likely used a clipart of axe by searching "axe" in Chinese ("斧头"). The exact image was found.

-- ..OK? Not sure how this means anything, let alone "solved".

To be fair, other comments in that 2017 threads confused me too, e.g.

> 1. The letter 'A' and an upside down Y-shaped character share the same key on a Chinese/English key board

I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about, as a native-Chinese speaker.

[frogulis]

I was wondering the same. After a little searching, I reckon they're referring to 人 on a keyboard using a dàyì layout.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayi_method

My first thought was bopomofo ㄚ (which corresponds pleasingly to pinyin "a") but that's just a normally-oriented Y! And it sits on the other side of the keyboard anyway

[CRConrad]

> I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about

The sibling post's "bopomofo" seems far more plausible, but if you're talking European alphabets, the Greek letter Lambda (for the L sound, AIUI) looks pretty much like an upside-down (lower-case) 'y'. Maybe one working hypothesis at the time was that the person set to find pics for the Chines pirate manufacturer looked at it the wrong way around, read it as a Lambda / L, and looked for pictures to illustrate that. Idunno, WAG.