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Iotified Big Yus Ѭ

Cyrillic Letters

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Origin Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire

Iotified Big Yus is the thirty-ninth letter of Cyrillic and writes a palatal glide followed by the nasal back vowel. It is the rarest of the four iotified signs because the sequence it records was itself uncommon, and it drops out of the orthography early as the nasal vowels are lost. Its place immediately after the plain big yus follows the pattern by which every iotified sign is listed directly after the vowel it is built on, an arrangement that runs through the whole of both Slavic alphabets and that has no parallel in the Greek order they otherwise follow. It has no numeral value, standing outside the Greek series entirely, and it is the first of the historic letters to disappear from the orthography.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Iotified Big Yus's own description discusses its early disappearance from the orthography, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Iotified Big Yus's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Attributions
Associated Sound
A palatal glide followed by the nasal back vowel 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire 2
Place of Origin
The First Bulgarian Empire, in the school of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, with Preslav and Ohrid the two centres most often named 2
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: one letter to a sound, built on Greek uncial letterforms with additional signs, several of them taken from Glagolitic, for the Slavonic sounds Greek could not write 1
Position
The thirty-ninth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Iotified Big Yus is the first of the historic letters to disappear from the orthography, dropping out early as the nasal vowels it depended on were lost from speech. 1
Learn More
The Iotified Big Yus: The Rarest Letter

This letter stands thirty ninth, the last of the four yus letters, and writes a glide followed by the nasal back vowel. It carries no numeral value.

It is built on the big yus with the glide sign in front of it, and it is the rarest sign in the alphabet. The sequence it writes was uncommon in Old Church Slavonic to begin with, and the letter is correspondingly scarce in the manuscripts.

That scarcity has consequences for what can be said about it. A letter written often is written consistently, because scribes have plenty of practice and plenty of exemplars; a letter written rarely drifts. This one is confused with the plain big yus from an early date, is sometimes replaced by a two letter spelling, and appears in different manuscripts in forms different enough that establishing a single canonical shape is not straightforward.

Nothing of it survives. When the nasal vowels went, the whole of its business went with them, and unlike the little yus it had no shape simple enough to be worth keeping for another purpose.

It is nevertheless part of the alphabet rather than an oddity, because the alphabet lists include it and because the system it belongs to is symmetrical: two nasal vowels, each with a plain and an iotified form, is a complete design, and a complete design is evidence about the people who made it.

What Happens to a Letter With Almost Nothing to Write

Low frequency is not a neutral property of a letter. It changes how the letter behaves, and the iotified big yus is the clearest case in this alphabet.

Frequent letters are stable. A scribe writes them thousands of times, sees them thousands of times, and any drift is corrected by the sheer weight of examples. Rare letters have none of that. They are written from memory of a rule rather than from habit, they are the ones a tired copyist substitutes for something similar, and the substitutions are not caught because the reader has no strong expectation either.

The result is a compounding problem for anyone studying such a letter. The evidence is thin, and it is also worse in quality than the evidence for common letters, because the errors are concentrated exactly where the practice is weakest. Statements about the shape, the distribution or even the existence of a rare sign in a given tradition therefore rest on a handful of attestations that may themselves be mistakes.

The practical consequence for this alphabet is that the four yus letters are ordered by how much can be confidently said about them, and the two iotified ones come last. The atlas records their derivations as debated for that reason as much as for any argument about Glagolitic: the evidence for the shapes is not good enough to support a firm claim in any direction.

Saying so is better than picking a reading, because a rare letter with a confident history is usually a rare letter somebody has overinterpreted.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Big Yus Ѫ, Alphabet Letters

The iotified big yus is built on the big yus with the glide sign in front of it.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Iotated Big Yus Ⱙ, 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

Iotified Big Yus is a letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which was assembled to write Old Church Slavonic and which takes its letter names from that language.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Related To

Iotated Big Yus Ⱙ, 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.)
Iotated Big Yus Ⱙ, 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
Old Church Slavonic Grammar
Horace G. Lunt, Mouton de Gruyter, 2001View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque letter names at the end of the Slavic alphabets, fert, kher, tsy and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

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 that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle 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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