Alphabet Letters
Iotified E Ѥ
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 E is the thirty-fifth letter of Cyrillic and writes a palatal glide followed by the vowel e. Like the other iotified signs it joins the letter for i to the letter for the vowel, so its structure is legible in its shape. The letter is a South Slavic feature of the orthography and is largely absent from the East Slavic recension, where the plain e letter does the same work, so its presence or absence in a manuscript is one of the marks by which the tradition behind a copy is identified. It has no numeral value, standing outside the Greek series entirely. Its shape joins the letter for i to the letter for the vowel, so the composition is visible on the page, which is true of every iotified sign in the script.
Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the NameNot established for this letter's own name
Iotified E's own description discusses its South Slavic distribution, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion. Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name
Iotified E's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion. Attributions
Associated SoundA palatal glide followed by the vowel e 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Origins
Origin PeriodDeveloped in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire 2 Place of OriginThe 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 TypeAn 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 PositionThe thirty-fifth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceIotified E's presence or absence in a manuscript identifies the recension behind it: the letter is a South Slavic feature largely absent from the East Slavic tradition, where the plain e letter does the same work. 1 Learn More
The Iotified E: The Ligature That Did Not Survive
This letter stands thirty fifth and writes the sequence of a glide followed by the vowel e. It carries no numeral value.
Like the iotified a it is a ligature, formed from the glide sign and the letter yest, and its two parts remain visible in the letterform. Old Church Slavonic distinguished the sequence it writes from the plain vowel e, and the distinction is real and grammatically loaded: it appears at the beginning of words and after other vowels, where the plain letter appears after consonants.
The distinction did not survive in the East Slavic tradition. The two letters fell together, and Russian ended with a single letter doing both jobs, its reading determined by position: at the start of a word or after a vowel it carries the glide, and after a consonant it does not, marking the consonant as soft instead. That is the same reinterpretation that overtook every letter in the iotified series.
Other Slavic languages went differently. Ukrainian keeps two separate letters for the plain vowel and for the glide plus vowel, so the distinction Old Church Slavonic made is still written there, with different shapes and by a different route.
The letter itself is gone from every modern alphabet, and it is one of the clearest cases in which what disappeared was a spelling rather than a sound.
Where the Distinction Went, and Where It Stayed
When two letters fall together, the usual assumption is that a distinction was lost. That is only sometimes true, and this letter is a good case for taking the assumption apart.
In Russian the letter went and the distinction stayed. The sequence of glide plus e is still pronounced, still distinct from plain e, and still written, but by a rule rather than by a letter: the reader derives it from the position of the vowel letter and from what stands before it. The information is fully recoverable, and no Russian speaker is ever in doubt. What was lost is a one to one relation between sign and sound, which is a loss of transparency rather than of content.
In Ukrainian the letter went and a different letter took the job, so the distinction stayed both in speech and on the page.
In the earliest Slavonic manuscripts there is a third situation, which is scribes writing the two letters interchangeably before either language had settled anything. That variation is often read as carelessness. It is at least as likely to be evidence that the scribe's own speech no longer supported the distinction the exemplar in front of him was making, which makes it data rather than error.
The general lesson applies well beyond this alphabet. A letter disappearing tells you about the writing system. To learn what happened to the language you have to look at what the surviving letters were made to do afterwards, and here they were made to do more.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
The iotified e is a ligature whose first element is the letter i, written for the glide.
The second element of the iotified e is yest, the plain vowel e.
Originates in Language
Iotified E 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.
Sources
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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