Alphabet Letters
Iotated Small Yus Ⱗ
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 Small Yus is the thirty-ninth letter of Glagolitic and writes a palatal glide followed by the nasal front vowel. It is built on the same principle as yu and the iotated forms of the other vowels, joining the sign for the glide to the sign for the vowel so that the sequence has one letter rather than two. Its Cyrillic counterpart is the ancestor, by a long chain of changes in shape and sound, of the modern Russian letter ya, so a sign for a nasal sequence that no living Slavic language has became one of the commonest letters in the largest Slavic alphabet. It carries no numeral value, standing beyond the end of the run of letters the alphabet counts, as every iotated sign does.
Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the NameNot established for this letter's own name
Iotated Small Yus's own description discusses the glide-plus-nasal-vowel principle its shape encodes, 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 NameNot established for this letter's own name
Iotated Small 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 SoundA palatal glide followed by the nasal front vowel 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Origins
Origin PeriodDevised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2 Place of OriginByzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2 Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1 PositionThe fortieth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThis letter's Cyrillic descendant is, by a long chain of changes in shape and sound, the ancestor of the modern Russian letter ya, so a sign for a nasal sequence no living Slavic language still has became one of the most common letters in the largest Slavic alphabet. 1 Learn More
Iotated Small Yus: The Glagolitic Letter
Iotated small yus writes a glide followed by the front nasal vowel, and it carries no numeral value. It combines two of the features that make the tail of the Slavonic alphabet what it is: the nasal vowels the language inherited, and the treatment of a glide plus vowel as a single unit deserving a sign of its own.
The result is a letter for a sound sequence that no Mediterranean script had any use for, and it is one of the plainest demonstrations that the alphabet was fitted to Slavonic rather than borrowed and made do with. A designer working from Greek alone could not have arrived at it.
The sequence is not frequent, and the letter is correspondingly less well attested than the plain nasal vowel signs. Where it does appear it is usually in particular grammatical endings, which is the general pattern for the glide sequences: they cluster in the inflectional system rather than spreading evenly through the vocabulary.
The name is opaque like the others at this end of the alphabet, and the atlas records that gap as an open question about the whole set of Slavonic letter names rather than guessing at any single one.
Nothing in the Glagolitic numeral system reaches this far, so the letter is unnumbered, as every sign after the second o letter is. The Cyrillic counterpart is unnumbered too, for the different reason that Greek had no letter here to lend a value.
Iotated Small Yus and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic has a letter for the same sequence, and the atlas pairs the two. Neither carries a numeral value, since Greek had nothing to supply here and the Glagolitic count had stopped several letters earlier.
The pairing is instructive because it holds in the part of the alphabet where the two scripts had least reason to agree. Nothing in the Greek model dictated that either alphabet should have a single letter for a glide plus a nasal vowel. Both do. Both put it in roughly the same place in the order. Both give it a name that no one can explain. That is a considerable amount of agreement about a sign that neither script inherited from anywhere, and it is one of the reasons the two alphabets are treated as belonging to one tradition even by scholars who disagree entirely about which came first.
The atlas records the pairing as a correspondence of sound, position and name, and declines to state a direction. The relations from these letters that concern descent are marked debated and carry the competing explanations, so a reader sees what is agreed and what is argued in the same place rather than being handed a conclusion the evidence does not support.
The sequence itself did not survive. The nasal vowels were lost everywhere except Polish, and the glide before them was absorbed or lost with them, so the sound this pair of letters records has to be reconstructed rather than heard anywhere today.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived from This
Why this is disputed. The iotified little yus writes an iotated nasal front vowel and answers to the Glagolitic iotated small yus. As with its back vowel counterpart, paleographers agree on the sound correspondence but disagree on whether the compound Cyrillic sign is a direct copy of the Glagolitic compound or a Cyrillic scribe's own construction built from simpler borrowed parts, since compound iotated letters are the weakest point in the letter by letter derivation claim.
Originates in Language
Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Iotated Small Yus belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic Iotified Little 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.
Iotified Little Yus answers to Glagolitic Iotated Small Yus: both write the same palatal-glide-plus-nasal-front-vowel sequence. Neither script numbers the letter.
Sources
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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