Iotated
In Slavic languages, iotation (, ) is a form of palatalization that occurs when a consonant comes into contact with the palatal approximant from the succeeding phoneme. The is represented by iota (ι) in the early Cyrillic alphabet and the Gre ...
A () is a letter of the
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
, built as a
ligature Ligature may refer to:
Language
* Ligature (writing), a combination of two or more letters into a single symbol (typography and calligraphy)
* Ligature (grammar), a morpheme that links two words
Medicine
* Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture us ...
of the letters
І and
А, and used today only in
Church Slavonic
Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The ...
. It is unusual among early Cyrillic letters in having no direct counterpart in
Glagolitic
The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodi ...
: Ⱑ (
jat’) is used for both /ě/ and /ja/. Accordingly, many early Cyrillic texts (particularly those with Glagolitic antecedents) may use for both these purposes; this practice continued into the fourteenth century, but was much more common in the South Slavonic than the East Slavonic area. Nevertheless, is attested in the earliest extant Cyrillic writings, including for example the ''
Codex Suprasliensis
The Codex Suprasliensis is a 10th-century Cyrillic literary monument, the largest extant Old Church Slavonic canon manuscript and the oldest Slavic literary work located in Poland. As of September 20, 2007, it is on UNESCO's Memory of the World l ...
'' and ''
Savvina Kniga'' - this was not supported to other fonts in other applications.
It continued in use in Serbian until the orthographical reforms of
Vuk Karadžić
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić ( sr-Cyrl, Вук Стефановић Караџић, ; 6 November 1787 (26 October OS)7 February 1864) was a Serbian philologist, anthropologist and linguist. He was one of the most important reformers of the moder ...
, and in Bulgarian (where it also acquired a
civil script
Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries.
Early changes
Old East ...
glyph variant) until the late nineteenth century. However it was never included in the
Russian civil script of
Peter I. Among the Eastern Slavs, the denasalisation of
probably to
and the subsequent coalescence of this sound with the /a/ phoneme meant that the letter
Ѧ acquired the same function as , and the two came to be regarded as variants of the same letter. This is still the case in modern Church Slavonic, where, broadly speaking, is used initially and Ѧ elsewhere, though exceptionally they may be used to make other distinctions, such as that between 'tongue' and 'people'.
Image:Iotified A2.png, Iotated A, both capital and lowercase forms (variant of civil script).
Image:Evolution of cursive Cyrillic iotated a, small yus, and ya.png, Evolution of iotated A and Little Yus.
Image:Ukrainian ia.JPG, Lowercase form of iotated a (Ukrainian variant).
In cursive, the letter was modified: the left side was gradually lost, turning only into a flourish, so it began to look like an 'а' with a 'с'-shaped tail at the top left (a similar metamorphosis occurred with the cursive 'Ю').
Computing codes
References
External links
CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER IOTIFIED A(
U+A656) on ScriptSource.org
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IOTIFIED A(
U+A657) on ScriptSource.org
{{Cyrillic navbox
Cyrillic ligatures