Ya or Ja (Я я; italics:
''Я я'') is a letter 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 cou ...
, the
civil script variant of Old Cyrillic Little
Yus () or maybe even '
Ꙗ'. Among modern
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto ...
, it is used in the
East Slavic languages and
Bulgarian. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by
Mongolian and many
Uralic
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian ...
,
Caucasian
Caucasian may refer to:
Anthropology
*Anything from the Caucasus region
**
**
** ''Caucasian Exarchate'' (1917–1920), an ecclesiastical exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Caucasus region
*
*
*
Languages
* Northwest Caucasian l ...
and
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic l ...
of the former Soviet Union.
Pronunciation
The
iotated vowel is pronounced in initial or post-vocalic positions, like the
English pronunciation of in "yard".
When follows a
soft consonant, no sound occurs between the consonant and the vowel.
The exact pronunciation of the
vowel sound
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
of depends also on the following sound
by allophony in the
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto ...
. Before a soft consonant, it is , like in the English "cat". If a hard consonant follows or none, the result is an
open vowel
An open vowel is a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels (in U.S. terminology ) in reference to the low position of the tongue.
In the cont ...
, usually [].
In non-stressed positionsm, the vowel reduction depends on the language and the dialect. The standard vowel reduction in Russian, Russian language reduces the vowel to [], but yakanye dialects undergo no reduction unlike other instances of the phoneme (represented with the letter ).
In
Bulgarian, the vowel sound is reduced to in unstressed syllables and is pronounced in both stressed verb and definite article endings.
History
The letter , known as little jus (yus) ( bg, малък юс, russian: юс малый) originally stood for a front nasal vowel, conventionally transcribed as ę. The history of the letter (in both
Church Slavonic and vernacular texts) varies according to the development of this sound in the different areas where Cyrillic was used.
In Serbia,
became
at a very early period and the letter ceased to be used, being replaced by
e. In Bulgaria the situation is complicated by the fact that dialects differ and that there were different orthographic systems in use, but broadly speaking
became
in most positions, but in some circumstances it merged with
particularly in inflexional endings, e.g. the third person plural ending of the present tense of certain verbs such as (Modern Bulgarian правят). The letter continued to be used, but its distribution, particularly in regard to the other
jusy, was governed as much by orthographical convention as by phonetic value or etymology.
Among the Eastern Slavs,
was denasalised, probably to
which palatalised the preceding consonant; after palatalisation became phonemic, the /æ/ phoneme merged with /a/, and ѧ henceforth indicated /a/ after a palatalised consonant, or else, in initial or post-vocalic position, /ja/. However, Cyrillic already had a character with this function, namely , so that for the Eastern Slavs these two characters were henceforth equivalent. The alphabet in
Meletij Smotrickij's grammar of 1619 accordingly lists "" ("ꙗ ili ѧ", "ꙗ or ѧ"); he explains that is used initially and elsewhere. (In fact he also distinguishes the feminine form of the accusative plural of the third person pronoun from the masculine and neuter .) This reflects the practice of earlier scribes and was further codified by the Muscovite printers of the seventeenth century (and is continued in modern Church Slavonic). However, in vernacular and informal writing of the period, the two letters may be used completely indiscriminately.
It was in
Russian cursive (skoropis') writing of this time that the letter acquired its modern form: the left-hand leg of was progressively shortened, eventually disappearing altogether, while the foot of the middle leg shifted towards the left, producing the я shape.
In the specimens of the
civil script produced for
Peter I, forms of and я were grouped together; Peter removed the first two, leaving only я in the modern alphabet, and its use in Russian remains the same to the present day. It was similarly adopted for the standardised orthographies of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, both Old Cyrillic and civil scripts were used for printing, with я in the latter corresponding to in the former, and there were various attempts to standardise the orthography, of which some, such as the Plovdiv school exemplified by
Nayden Gerov, were more conservative, essentially preserving the Middle Bulgarian distribution of the letter, others attempted to rationalise spelling on more phonetic principles, and one project in 1893 proposed abolishing the letter я altogether. By the early twentieth century, under Russian influence, я came to be used for (which is not a reflex of ę in Bulgarian), retaining its use for but was no longer used for other purposes; this is its function today.
Use in loanwords and transcriptions
In Russian, the letter has little use in
loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
s and
orthographic transcriptions of foreign words. A notable exception is the use of to transcribe , mostly from Romance languages, Polish, German and Arabic. This makes to match [] better than its dark l pronunciation in . is also used to transcribe Romanian , pronounced as .
Although is a distinctive pronunciation of in Russian, the letter is almost never used to transcribe that sound, unlike
the use of to approximate close
front
Front may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* ''The Front'' (1943 film), a 1943 Soviet drama film
* '' The Front'', 1976 film
Music
*The Front (band), an American rock band signed to Columbia Records and active in the 1980s and e ...
and
central rounded vowels. Nonetheless, is used for
Estonian and
Finnish – for instance,
Pärnu
Pärnu () is the fourth largest city in Estonia. Situated in southwest Estonia, Pärnu is located south of the Estonian capital, Tallinn, and west of Estonia's second largest city, Tartu. The city sits off the coast of Pärnu Bay, an inlet o ...
is written in Russian, although the Russian pronunciation does not match the original.
Related letters and other similar characters
*Ѧ ѧ:
Cyrillic letter Little Yus
*:
Cyrillic letter Iotated A
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 cou ...
*ᴙ : Latin letter small capital reversed R, used informally in phonetics to represent the
epiglottal trill (see
IPA consonants)
*Â â:
Latin letter  - a Romanian and Vietnamese letter
*R r:
Latin letter R
Computing codes
Unicode provides separate code-points for the Old Cyrillic and civil script forms of this letter. A number of Old Cyrillic fonts developed before the publication of Unicode 5.1 placed Iotified A () at the code points for Ya (Я/я) instead of the Private Use Area,
[According to th]
Unicode FAQ
“characters that are not yet in the standard need to be represented by codepoints in the Private Use Area” but since Unicode 5.1, Iotified A has been encoded separately from Ya .
See also
*
Faux Cyrillic
References
External links
*
*{{Wiktionary-inline, я