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Alphabet Letters

Yu Ⱓ

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

Yu is the thirty-fifth letter of Glagolitic and writes the sequence of a palatal glide and the vowel u. It is the first of a series of letters that write a glide plus a vowel as a single sign, a device Slavonic needed because those sequences were common at the start of words and after other vowels. The same principle produces the iotated forms of e, of a and of the two nasal vowels, so this letter is the simplest member of a set rather than an isolated sign. Its Cyrillic counterpart survives in the modern Russian and Bulgarian alphabets with the same value. Its shape joins the sign for the glide to the sign for the vowel, so the composition of the letter is legible in the letter itself.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yu's own description discusses the glide-plus-vowel principle its shape encodes, 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
Yu'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 sequence yu, a palatal glide followed by u 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-sixth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Yu is the simplest member of a set of glide-plus-vowel signs that Old Church Slavonic needed because such sequences were common at the start of words and after other vowels; its Cyrillic counterpart survives with the same value in modern Russian and Bulgarian. 1
Learn More
Yu: The Glagolitic Letter

Yu writes the sequence of a glide followed by the vowel u, and it carries no numeral value, standing past the end of the Glagolitic counted series.

Old Church Slavonic distinguishes a plain vowel from the same vowel preceded by a glide, and it distinguishes them consistently, so the alphabet needed signs for the combinations as well as for the vowels. Several such signs occupy the tail of the order, this one among them, and their presence is one of the clearest indications that the alphabet was designed for the language rather than adapted to it. Greek had no comparable need and no comparable signs, so nothing here could be inherited.

The letter is common, because the sequence it writes is common in Slavonic endings and in the pronouns and particles the language uses constantly. That makes it one of the well attested forms in both the rounded and the angular hands.

Its name is opaque. Like every letter name in this part of the alphabet it is recorded in the reference literature without a gloss, and the atlas carries an open question about the whole set rather than proposing a reading for any single one of them.

The letter also has a long afterlife. It passed into the Cyrillic tradition and from there into the modern orthographies of several Slavic languages, where the descendant sign still writes the same glide and vowel together. Very few of the letters at this end of the Glagolitic order survived that well, and the ones that did are the ones whose sounds the languages kept.

Yu and the Glide Sequences of the Alphabet

The letters at the end of the Slavonic order that write a glide followed by a vowel are worth taking together, because as a group they show what kind of design decision was being made. The language had a series of such sequences, and there were two ways to write them: with two signs, a letter for the glide and a letter for the vowel, or with a single sign for the whole combination. Both Slavonic alphabets chose single signs for most of the series.

That choice has consequences a modern reader can see. It makes the alphabet longer than it strictly needs to be, and it makes the relationship between spelling and sound more direct, because a reader meets one shape for one syllable rather than assembling it. It also means the alphabet encodes a piece of Slavonic phonology in its inventory: the sequences it gives letters to are the ones the language treated as units.

The Cyrillic alphabet made the same choice for the same sequences, and in one case, the glide with e, it built its sign visibly out of two letters written together, which shows the alternative being used alongside the rule. The atlas pairs the counterpart letters of the two scripts where a pairing can be made and marks the ones where it cannot rather than forcing a match.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived from This

Yu Ю, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Yu writes the sequence of a glide and the vowel u, a combination Greek had no single sign for, and Cyrillic scholars generally read the sign as built by combining Cyrillic's own borrowed elements rather than copied whole from a single Glagolitic letter. Whether that counts as derivation from Glagolitic in the same sense as the simpler signs, or as a Cyrillic-side construction that merely echoes Glagolitic's general solution, is an open point in the letter by letter accounts.

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 Yu 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
Yu Ю, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Yu 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.)
Yu Ю, Alphabet Letters

Yu answers to Glagolitic Yu: both write the same glide-plus-vowel sequence with the same glide-plus-vowel construction. 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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