Psi Ѱ

Psi stands forty first, writes the cluster ps, and carries the numeral 700 from Greek psi.

Like ksi it writes nothing Slavonic needs. The cluster can be spelled with the letters for p and s, and in native vocabulary it is. The letter exists to preserve the Greek spelling of Greek words and to occupy its place in the Greek numeral series.

One category of word kept it conspicuously in use. The psalms, the psalter and the vocabulary built around them all begin with this cluster in Greek, and the psalter was the single most copied, most read and most memorised book in the Slavonic tradition, used for teaching literacy as well as for prayer. A letter that appears in the title of the book everyone learned to read from is not obscure, whatever the rest of the vocabulary looks like.

Its numeral value of 700 put it in every date in Slavonic books during long stretches of the reckoning from the creation of the world.

It was among the letters removed from secular printing with the introduction of the civil type in the early eighteenth century, the subject of the companion article, and it remains in the church books today.

The letter also does a job no rule required it to do. Because Slavonic writes the cluster with this single sign in words taken from Greek and with two separate letters in native words, the choice of spelling tells a reader where a word came from. The same holds for ksi. A scribe following the convention was therefore marking the vocabulary of the church off from the vocabulary of the language, silently and on every page, and a modern reader can use the distinction the same way, as a first indication of whether a word is a borrowing before looking anything up.

In 1708 a new type was introduced in Russia for printing books that were not liturgical, revised in 1710, and the alphabet was never the same again.

The design was the point. The letterforms were redrawn on the model of the Latin types then used in western Europe, with the proportions, the contrast and the roundness of a printed roman face rather than the shapes descended from the half ustav hand. A page set in the new type looks European at a glance, which is exactly what it was meant to do, and it is a piece of state policy carried out in punchcutting.

The repertoire was cut down at the same time. Letters that wrote nothing the language needed were dropped from the new alphabet, among them ksi, psi, omega and the surviving yus letters, and the elaborate apparatus of superscripts, accents and abbreviation marks went with them.

The result was two alphabets in one country. Secular Russian was printed in the civil type with a reduced letter set, and the church went on printing Slavonic in the old type with the full one, and both traditions continue to this day. Every modern Cyrillic alphabet in the world descends in its letterforms from that 1708 type, including those of languages that never had anything to do with Russia.

The reform of 1918 finished a job this one started, and it is worth noticing that the harder of the two was the earlier: cutting new type and reprinting a country's books is a larger undertaking than issuing a decree.