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Uk Ѹ

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

Uk is the twenty-first letter of Cyrillic and writes the vowel u. It is a digraph, the letters for o and u written together, taken over from the Greek spelling of the same vowel, and it carries the numeral 400. Glagolitic wrote this vowel with a single sign, so this is one of the places where the older Slavic script is the more economical of the two. A monograph form, a single letter for the same sound, appears later in the manuscripts as a simplification of the digraph and is encoded separately. The value 400 is also given to izhitsa in the printed Church Slavonic numeral tables, and the two usages belong to different periods.

Facts
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
Origin of the Name
A Slavonic word used as the letter name, the same root behind its already-live Glagolitic cognate uku, whose own description states the word directly; extended from that cognate rather than restated independently, since Uk's own description gives only the digraph history. 1
Sense of the Name
Generally read as carrying the same Slavonic root behind teaching or learning that its already-live Glagolitic cognate uku carries, extended from that cognate's own recorded sense rather than restated independently in this letter's own description. 1
Open Questions
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The value 400 is carried by uk in the manuscript tradition and by izhitsa in the printed Church Slavonic numeral tables, which follow the Greek series exactly; the atlas records both letters at 400 rather than choosing between two attested usages 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Which letter properly carries 400 is not settled, and nobody holds a position on it. The manuscript tradition gives the value to uk and the printed Church Slavonic tables give it to izhitsa. Both usages are attested, they cannot both hold in one book, and no survey has established which is primary or when the printed usage arose. The atlas records 400 on both letters, which is a compromise rather than an answer. This is an unfilled gap and not an argument between camps, which is why it is recorded unknown. The open question on this page says what would close it.
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 twenty-first letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Attributions
Associated Sound
The vowel u 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Learn More
Uk: The Letter Written as Two

Uk stands twenty first and writes the vowel u. It is not a single sign in the early alphabet but a digraph, written as the letter for o followed by the sign taken from Greek upsilon, and its name is the Slavonic word for teaching or learning.

The compound spelling is a Greek inheritance. Greek wrote u with omicron and upsilon together, and the Slavonic translators took the convention with the letters, even though Slavonic u is a plain vowel needing no such treatment. It is one of the clearest instances of the alphabet importing a Greek orthographic habit that its own language did not require.

Scribes soon economised. The two elements were stacked one above the other, and the stacked form eventually became a letter in its own right, which is the ancestor of the modern printed u in the East Slavic alphabets. Both the wide and the stacked forms appear in the church books, distributed by position rather than by sound.

The numeral value is 400, and here the tradition divides against itself. The manuscript tradition gives 400 to uk; the printed Church Slavonic tables give it to izhitsa. Both usages are attested, they are not reconcilable, and a reader working with a number in the four hundreds needs to know which tradition the book in front of them follows.

Digraphs, and the Letters That Are Really Two Letters

Several signs in the Early Cyrillic alphabet are compounds, and the alphabet treats them inconsistently, which is one of the reasons different authorities give different totals for how many letters it had.

Uk is written as o plus the upsilon sign. Yery is written as the back jer followed by an i. The iotified letters, the iotified a, the iotified e and the two iotified yus letters, are ligatures of the glide sign with the vowel that follows it. In every case the compound was originally transparent: a reader could see the parts, and a scribe wrote them as parts.

What happened next differed from case to case. Some compounds fused into shapes no longer analysable, and were then counted as letters, given a name and, in the alphabet lists, a place. Others stayed visibly compound and were counted as spellings rather than as letters. Nothing in the tradition decided the question in general, and the alphabet tables in different manuscripts and different printed books do not agree.

That is why the count of Early Cyrillic letters is given variously in the forty to fifty range depending on the authority. The disagreement is not about what was written on the page, which is well known. It is about whether a fused ligature counts as one letter or two, and it is a question of definition rather than of evidence.

The atlas follows a common convention of listing the compounds as letters, which is what the Slavonic alphabet tables themselves generally do.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Omicron ο, Alphabet Letters

Uk is written as a digraph on the Greek model, and its first element is the sign taken from Greek omicron.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Upsilon υ, Alphabet Letters

The second element of the uk digraph is the sign taken from Greek upsilon. Greek wrote u with omicron and upsilon together, and Slavonic took the convention with the letters.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Uk 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

Uku Ⱆ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic uk answers to Glagolitic uku, both writing the vowel u with the value 400. Glagolitic uses a single sign where Cyrillic writes a digraph.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
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)
Which letter carries the numeral 400 in Church Slavonic, uk or izhitsa?

The manuscript tradition gives 400 to uk. The printed Church Slavonic tables give it to izhitsa. Both usages are attested and they cannot both be right for any one book, so a number in the four hundreds cannot be read without knowing which tradition the source follows. The atlas records the value on both letters for that reason, which is a compromise rather than an answer.

What would resolve this A survey of dated Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books recording which letter carries 400 in each, by region and by period, which would establish whether the printed usage is an innovation of the printers, an inheritance from one recension, or a correction toward the Greek series.
Slavic palaeography and the history of Slavonic printingPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.