Pictures of yachts were extremely common when I was a child. They featured in every seaside illustration, and there were lots of those. I was also taught to draw a yacht very early on: just after houses and people.
Disclaimer: we had a half share in a yacht, so this is probably partly my privilege talking.
I think yacht as in sail-boat, the sort of thing that's also called a dinghy, used to be a common children's toy. Lots of alphabet books also have things like drums and toy soldiers, which aren't really common objects in modern children's lives, but have become part of children's culture because they're archetypal toys.
I think it's in alphabet books as one of the few nouns in English to begin with Y, and because they can draw it very simply as a small boat with sails.
When I was a child, I understood 'yacht' to mean a small sailing boat, like the ones which feature in Swallows and Amazons (both the book and the film). Toddlers might see them on lakes or the sea, if they happened to live near to either / both. I only learnt much later that small sailing boats are actually often called 'dinghies'. As I child, I thought 'dinghy' exclusively meant a rubber inflatable boat.
All this aside, it occurs to me now that 'yacht' is a pretty crazy word to ask toddlers to cope with at all, even if they're only really focusing on the first letter, given the almost total mismatch between how it is spelt and how it is pronounced. I think if I were designing a toddlers' alphabet book myself, I'd probably go with 'yo-yo' instead. Or maybe 'yoghurt', since they actually eat those. I wouldn't recommend letting a toddler encounter a yo-yo at close range, come to think about it.
For me, a yacht is a large, luxurious boat, something that a rich person would own. But that may just be coastal-dwelling, Southern California-me speaking. R. loves about books about boats and trucks and vehicles, and in the American books, I don't see any yachts; there are sailboats (not motor-powered), speed boats, and military ships. We have one British book that has a yacht in it, but I've never encountered that word outside that one book. The Y's in A-B-C books are almost always yak or yellow.
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Disclaimer: we had a half share in a yacht, so this is probably partly my privilege talking.
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Of course modern yachts are not sailboats, but I bet if you researched it you'd find use of 'yacht' goes back a good few decades - for example: http://www.alephbet.com/pages/books/36423/object-alphabet-book
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All this aside, it occurs to me now that 'yacht' is a pretty crazy word to ask toddlers to cope with at all, even if they're only really focusing on the first letter, given the almost total mismatch between how it is spelt and how it is pronounced. I think if I were designing a toddlers' alphabet book myself, I'd probably go with 'yo-yo' instead. Or maybe 'yoghurt', since they actually eat those. I wouldn't recommend letting a toddler encounter a yo-yo at close range, come to think about it.
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