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Alphabet Letters

Yeri Ⱐ

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

Yeri is the thirty-second letter of Glagolitic and writes the high unrounded vowel that the Slavic languages keep as Russian y and Polish y. In both Glagolitic and Cyrillic the sign is composed rather than simple: it joins the back jer to one of the i letters, which is why its name and its shape both look like a compound. That composition is a piece of evidence about how the alphabets were built, since a maker who was inventing freely would not need to build a vowel out of two other signs, and it is cited in discussions of how the Slavic scripts handled a vowel system Greek could not describe.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yeri's own description discusses the composed shape of the sign, 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 Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yeri'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 Sound
The vowel y, a high central or back unrounded vowel 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2
Place of Origin
Byzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1
Position
The thirty-third letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Yeri's sign is composed rather than simple in both Slavic scripts, joining the back jer to one of the i letters, a fact cited as evidence about how the alphabets handled a vowel system Greek had no way to describe. 1
Learn More
Yeri: The Glagolitic Letter

Yeri, in the arrangement the atlas follows, writes the vowel conventionally transliterated y, a high back unrounded vowel distinct from the ordinary i, and it carries no numeral value.

The vowel is one of the more distinctive sounds of the Slavic languages and it survives in several of them. In Old Church Slavonic it stands in regular alternation with i, appearing after certain consonants where i appears after others, so a reader who knows the pattern can often predict which of the two a given ending will show.

How the earliest Glagolitic wrote this vowel is described differently by different authorities. Some accounts treat it as a compound, written by placing two existing signs together, and others list it as a letter in its own right. The Unicode Standard encodes a letter here, which is the arrangement the atlas follows, and the disagreement in the literature is about the manuscripts rather than about the encoding.

The name is opaque in both Slavonic scripts. That is the ordinary condition of the letter names in this part of the alphabet, and the atlas carries an open question about the whole set rather than proposing readings for individual names.

No numeral attaches to the letter in either Slavonic script. It stands past the end of the Glagolitic counted series, and Cyrillic, numbering only what Greek numbered, had nothing to give a vowel that Greek did not possess. The unnumbered tail of the alphabet is where the two scripts are most alike in what they were trying to do and least alike in how they look doing it.

Yeri and the Vowels at the End of the Order

The last stretch of the Slavonic alphabet is where the two scripts were doing their most original work, and it is also where the modern lists agree least. Everything from the affricates onward records a sound Greek did not have, so nothing could be inherited and every sign had to be decided. The reduced vowels, this vowel, the letter for yat, the glide sequences and the nasal vowels are all in that stretch.

The consequence is that the tail of the alphabet is the part where authorities differ over the inventory, over the order and over whether particular signs are letters or compounds. That is not carelessness in the sources. It reflects a real situation in the manuscripts, which were produced across several centuries in several regions by traditions that had diverged, and which do not present one alphabet to be catalogued.

The atlas lists the letters as the Unicode Standard arranges them and says where the arrangement is a choice among attested possibilities rather than a fact. That is the only honest way to present a repertoire assembled from a tradition that never settled on one. Where a specific question can be stated, such as what a particular sign wrote or whether a name ever carried a sense, it is recorded as an open question so that someone can take it further.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived from This

Yeri Ь, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Yeri, the front jer, writes the second of the two reduced vowels and is usually read as a Cyrillic adaptation of the Glagolitic yeri. As with its back vowel counterpart, the same caution applies: the sound it wrote largely disappeared early in most Slavic languages, so some paleographers treat the surviving Cyrillic shape as reflecting later scribal practice rather than a direct, unbroken copy of the Glagolitic original.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Yeri belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Related To

Cyril of Thessalonica, Historical Figures
Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik
Yery Ы, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Yery 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.)
Yery Ы, Alphabet Letters

Yery answers to Glagolitic Yeri: both write the high unrounded vowel with a compound sign joining the back jer to an i letter. 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
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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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.