Omega (Ѡ ѡ or
Ѡ ѡ; italics: ''Ѡ ѡ'' or
''Ѡ ѡ'') is a letter used in the
early Cyrillic alphabet
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 ...
. Its name and form are derived from the
Greek letter Omega (Ω ω).
In some forms it looks similar to the letter
We.
Unlike
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, the
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...
had only a single sound, so Omega was little used compared to the
letter O (О о), descended from the
Greek letter Omicron. In the older
ustav writing Omega was used mainly for its
numeric value of 800, and rarely appeared even in Greek words. In later semi-ustav manuscripts it was used for decorative purposes, along with the broad version () as well as the
Broad On (Ѻ ѻ).
Modern
Church Slavonic
Church Slavonic (, , literally "Church-Slavonic language"), also known as Church Slavic, New Church Slavonic or New Church Slavic, is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bosnia and Herzeg ...
has developed strict rules for the use of these letterforms.
Another variation of omega is the ''ornate'' or ''beautiful omega'', used as an interjection, “O!”. It is represented in Unicode 5.1 by the misnamed
[Nikita Simmons, Aleksandr Andreev and Yuri Shardt (2011–2012) “The Complete Character Range for Slavonic Script in Unicode”, Ponomar Project] character ''omega with
titlo
Titlo is an extended diacritic symbol initially used in early Cyrillic and Glagolitic manuscripts, e.g., in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic languages. The word is a borrowing from the Greek "", "title" (compare dated English ''tittle'' ...
'' (). It descends from the Greek omega with the smooth breathing (psili) and circumflex (perispomeni) diacritical marks (Ὦ ὦ), also used in the corresponding exclamation in ancient Greek.
Computing codes
See also
*
Latin omega
Latin omega, or simply omega, is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet, based on the lowercase of the Greek letter omega . It was included as a Latin letter in the Mann and Dalby 1982 revision of the African reference alphabet and has been us ...
External links
A Berdnikov and O Lapko, "Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode", EuroTEX ’99 Proceedings September 1999 (
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
)
References
Vowel letters
{{cyrillic-alphabet-stub