Big Yus iotified
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Little yus (Ѧ ѧ) and big yus (Ѫ ѫ), or jus, are letters of the
Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...
representing two
Common Slavonic Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6 ...
nasal vowels in the
early Cyrillic The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...
and
Glagolitic The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...
alphabets. Each can occur in iotated form (Ѩ ѩ, Ѭ ѭ), formed as ligatures with the
decimal i The dotted i (І і; italics: '), also called decimal i (и десятеричное, after its former numeric value), is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation o ...
(І). Other yus letters are blended yus (Ꙛ ꙛ), closed little yus (Ꙙ ꙙ) and iotated closed little yus (Ꙝ ꙝ). Phonetically, little yus represents a nasalized front vowel, possibly , while big yus represents a nasalized back vowel, such as IPA . This is also suggested by the appearance of each as a 'stacked' digraph of 'Am' and 'om' respectively. The names of the letters do not imply
capitalization Capitalization (American English) or capitalisation (British English) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term ...
, as both little and big yus exist in majuscule and
minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
variants.


Disappearance

All modern Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet have lost the nasal vowels (at least in their standard varieties), making Yus unnecessary.


In Bulgarian and Macedonian

Big Yus was a part of the Bulgarian alphabet until 1945. However by then, in the eastern dialects, the back nasal was pronounced the same way as ъ . Because the language is based mainly on them, the western pronunciations were deemed unliterary, and the letter was gone. There were some Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects spoken around
Thessaloniki Thessaloniki (; el, Θεσσαλονίκη, , also known as Thessalonica (), Saloniki, or Salonica (), is the second-largest city in Greece, with over one million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and the capital of the geographic region of ...
and
Kastoria Kastoria ( el, Καστοριά, ''Kastoriá'' ) is a city in northern Greece in the region of Western Macedonia. It is the capital of Kastoria regional unit, in the geographic region of Macedonia. It is situated on a promontory on the weste ...
in northern Greece (
Kostur dialect The Kostur dialect ( mk, Костурски дијалект, ''Kosturski dijalekt''), is a member of the Southwestern subgroup of the Southeastern group of dialects of the Macedonian language. This dialect is mainly spoken in and around the ...
, Solun dialect) that still preserve a nasal pronunciation e.g. (; "Where are you going, dear child?"), which could be spelled pre-reform as "" with big and little yus. On a visit to
Razlog Razlog ( bg, Разлог ) is a town and ski resort in Razlog Municipality, Blagoevgrad Province in southwestern Bulgaria. It is situated in the Razlog Valley and was first mentioned during the reign of Byzantine emperor Basil II. The municipali ...
, in Bulgaria's
Pirin Macedonia Pirin Macedonia or Bulgarian Macedonia ( bg, Пиринска Македония; Българска Македония) (''Pirinska Makedoniya or Bulgarska Makedoniya'') is the third-biggest part of the geographical region Macedonia located on t ...
, in 1955, the Russian dialectologist
Samuil Bernstein Samuil Borisovich Bernstein (russian: Самуил Борисович Бернштейн; surname also transcribed as Bernshteyn; , Barguzin – October 6, 1997, Moscow) was a Soviet linguist, known for his work on Slavic languages, in particular ...
noticed that the nasal pronunciation of words like (hand), (child) could still be heard from some of the older women of the village. To the younger people, the pronunciation was completely alien; they would think that the old ladies were speaking
Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...
.October 27, 1955 entry in Bernstein's diary
Зигзаги памяти
Bernstein transcribed the words as рънка, чендо.


In Russian

In
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
, the little Yus came to be pronounced as an iotated () in the middle or at the end of a word and therefore came to represent that sound also elsewhere; the modern letter is an adaptation of its cursive form of the 17th century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708. (That is also why in Russian often corresponds to nasalized ' in Polish; cf. Russian ; Polish '.)


In Polish

In Polish, which is a Slavic language written in the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
, the letter '' Ę ę'' has the phonetic value of little Yus, and '' Ą ą'' has that of big Yus. The iotated forms are written ''ię/ję'' and ''ią/ją'', respectively. However, the phonemes written ''ę'' and ''ą'' are not directly descended from those represented by little and big yus but developed after the original nasals merged in Polish and then diverged again. ( Kashubian, the closest language to Polish, uses the letter '' ã'' instead of ''ę''.)


In Romanian

Little and big yuses can also be found in the
Romanian Cyrillic alphabet Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania **Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language Romanian (obsolete spellings: Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: ''limba română'' , or ''românește ...
, used until 1862. Little Yus was used for and big Yus for unknown vowels, transcribed in later Romanian as and . Now Romanian uses the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
and is written Îî or Ââ. is written as Ăă. One of the first transcriptions of the big yus as î in Romanian is found in Samuel Klain, Acathist, Sibii, 1801.


In Slovak

Little yus in the Slovak alphabet has been substituted by ''a'' (''desať'', ''načať''), ''e'' (''plesať''), iotated ''ia'' (''žiadať'', ''kliatba'', ''mesiac''), ''ie'' (''bdieť'') and ''ä'' in several cases (''pamäť'', ''päť'', ''svätý''). Big yus is transliterated and pronounced as ''u'', or accented ''ú'' (''budeš'', ''muž'', ''mučeník'', ''ruka'', ''navyknúť'', ''pristúpiť'', ''púť'', ''usnúť''). Iotated, and closed iotated form of little yus occur as ''ja'' (e.g. ''jazyk'', ''svoja'', ''javiť'', ''jasle'').


In Ruthenian

In Ruthenian language, little yus was used to transcribe the sound ''ja'' (as in руска(ѧ) мова ("Ruthenian language") or ѧзыкъ ("language")). This evolved into and corresponded with the letter я in the descendant languages of Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn.


In Interslavic

The Interslavic language, a zonal, constructed, semi-artificial language based on Proto-Slavic and Old Church Slavonic modified based on the commonalities between living Slavic languages, allows (though does not encourage it for intelligibility purposes) to use both the little and big yus when writing in the scientific variety of its Cyrillic script. The letters correspond directly to their etymological values from Proto-Slavic, but do not retain the nasal pronunciation, instead going for one aiming to convey the "middle-ground" sounds found in etymologically corresponding letters in living Slavic languages. The little yus corresponds to the Latin letter "ę", while the big yus to "ų" in the etymological Latin script. The iotated versions are not part of the standard scientific vocabulary, where the yuses are instead accompanied by the Cyrillic letter "ј", also used in the modern
Serbian alphabet The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet ( sr, / , ) is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language, updated in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write standard modern Serbian, th ...
, though their use is optionally permissible for aesthetic reasons if one opts for using the more standard iotated vowels in their writing, so that consistency is preserved. As of May 2019, no official "scientific Cyrillic" is endorsed by the Interslavic Commission for the reason that while Latin is easier to modify by simply adding diacritics, Cyrillic requires completely distinct graphemes. That is very likely to significantly hamper intelligibility for first-time readers, so yuses should not be used in writing when aiming to convey an easily understandable message.


Related letters and other similar characters

* Я я : Cyrillic letter Ya * Ѣ ѣ :
Cyrillic letter Yat , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = Gr ...
* Ę ę : Latin letter E with ogonek - a Polish letter * Ą ą : Latin letter A with ogonek - a Polish letter


Computing codes


References

{{cite web , url=http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0400.pdf , title=Cyrillic: Range: 0400–04FF , work=The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0 , year=2010 , page=41 , access-date=2011-10-31 Cyrillic ligatures