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Iotated Big Yus Ⱙ

Glagolitic Letters

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Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius

Iotated Big Yus is the forty-first letter of Glagolitic and writes a palatal glide followed by the nasal back vowel. It completes the set of four iotated signs, alongside yu, the iotated e and the iotated small yus, and it is the rarest of them in the manuscripts because the sequence it records was itself uncommon. Its place in the alphabet, after the plain big yus, follows the pattern by which each iotated sign is listed immediately after the vowel it is built on, which is one of the ways the order of the Slavic alphabets can be seen to have been arranged rather than inherited. It carries no numeral value, standing beyond the end of the run of letters the alphabet counts.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Iotated Big Yus's own description discusses its rarity among the four iotated signs, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Iotated Big Yus's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Attributions
Associated Sound
A palatal glide followed by the nasal back vowel 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2
Place of Origin
Byzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1
Position
The forty-second letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
This is the rarest of the four iotated signs in the manuscripts, because the glide-plus-nasal-back-vowel sequence it records was itself uncommon in speech. 1
Learn More
Iotated Big Yus: The Glagolitic Letter

Iotated big yus writes a glide followed by the back nasal vowel, and it carries no numeral value. It is the counterpart, in the back series, of the letter for the glide plus the front nasal vowel, and the two of them complete the set of nasal signs at the end of the Slavonic alphabet.

The sequence is not common, and the letter is correspondingly less frequent in the manuscripts than the plain yus signs. Where it appears it is typically in inflectional endings, following the general pattern of the glide sequences, which belong more to the grammar of the language than to its vocabulary.

The sound is doubly lost to the modern Slavic languages, since both the nasality and the particular sequence went the way of the rest of the nasal system, so the letter records something that has to be reconstructed rather than heard. That is the ordinary condition of the letters at this end of the alphabet, and it is why an early Slavonic manuscript is a source for the history of a language family and not only for the text it carries.

The name is opaque, and the atlas records the fact rather than filling it.

The letter is unnumbered in both Slavonic scripts. Glagolitic had stopped counting well before this point in the order, and Cyrillic numbers only where a Greek letter stands in the slot, which for a Slavic nasal vowel preceded by a glide it plainly does not. The whole nasal group is outside the arithmetic of both systems.

Iotated Big Yus and the Completeness of the Design

Taken together, the four nasal signs at the end of the Slavonic order, the front and back nasal vowels and each of them preceded by a glide, are the best evidence in the alphabet that its designer worked systematically rather than piecemeal. The language had a set of sounds; the alphabet has a matching set of signs; and the matching is exact, including the rarest member of the set, which a designer working by ear and stopping when the common cases were covered would have missed.

That systematic quality is one of the reasons the Slavonic alphabets are held up as an unusually good fit between a script and a language. The comparison usually drawn is with alphabets that were adapted rather than designed, which typically leave some sounds unwritten and some letters idle, and both Slavonic scripts have very few of either.

It also bears on the question of how the alphabet was made. A script assembled gradually by scribes tends to accumulate exceptions; a script designed at one time by one person tends to be regular and to have gaps only where the designer's ear failed. The Slavonic evidence looks like the second, which is consistent with what the early sources say about its origin, and it is one of the few arguments about the alphabet that does not depend on the shapes of the letters.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived from This

Iotified Big Yus Ѭ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. The iotified big yus writes an iotated nasal back vowel and answers directly to the Glagolitic iotated big yus in both sound and numeral role. Whether that correspondence reflects a straight graphic copy or a Cyrillic scribe's own ligature of the plain big yus with an iotation mark is disputed among Slavists, since the compound letters are exactly the group where Cyrillic diverges most from tracing its Glagolitic model stroke for stroke.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Iotated Big Yus belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Related To

Cyril of Thessalonica, Historical Figures
Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik
Iotified Big Yus Ѭ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Iotified Big Yus writes the same sound and stands in the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter. Which of the two Slavonic scripts came first, and how much either owes the other, is argued rather than settled.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Iotified Big Yus Ѭ, Alphabet Letters

Iotified Big Yus answers to Glagolitic Iotated Big Yus: both write the same palatal-glide-plus-nasal-back-vowel sequence. Neither script numbers the letter.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996on the Slavic alphabets, their letters and their numeral systemsView the Source
2. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius
Francis Dvornik, Rutgers University Press, 1970on the Moravian mission and the making of the Slavic lettersView the Source
The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Consortiumon the encoded characters, their names and their block assignmentView the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque Glagolitic letter names, fritu, heru, tsi and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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