Izhitsa and the End of the Alphabet

The last two letters of the Slavonic order are both Greek letters kept for Greek spelling, and putting them at the end says something about how the alphabet was arranged. The Greek order supplies the frame for the first part; the Slavic sounds Greek could not write are fitted in after it; and the Greek letters that Slavonic does not need for its own words are pushed to the very end, where they can be learned last and used least.

That arrangement is shared by both Slavonic scripts, and it is one more item on the list of things they agree about. The agreement runs through the order, the names, the sounds and the general structure, and stops at the letterforms and the arithmetic. Any account of the relationship between the two alphabets has to explain a pair of scripts that share almost everything except appearance.

Izhitsa is also where a reader of a later Slavic orthography meets the tail of this history directly. The letter survived in Russian church and civil printing for centuries after it had ceased to be useful, restricted to a handful of words, and was finally abolished by spelling reform. It is a Greek letter that entered Slavonic in the ninth century for a translation project and left it in the twentieth by decree.