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Ya (Cyrillic)
Encyclopedia
Ya is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet
, the civil script variant of Old Cyrillic Little Yus . Among modern Slavonic languages it is used by Russian
, Belarusian
, Ukrainian
and Bulgarian
to represent both the combination /ja/ in initial or post-vocalic position and /a/ after a palatalised consonant
; in Bulgarian
the vowel sound is reduced to /ɐ/ in unstressed syllables, and is pronounced /ɤ̞/ in stressed verb and definite article endings. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian
and many Uralic
, Caucasian
and Turkic languages
of the former Soviet Union. In early manuscripts is sometimes used as a numeral with the value 900 (more usually represented by ); this results from its close resemblance to sampi
as it appears in contemporary Greek manuscripts.
The letter , known as little jus 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, [ę] became [e] 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 [ę] became [e] in most positions, but in some circumstances it merged with [ǫ], 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, [ę] was denasalised, probably to [æ], 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 “”; 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.
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In the specimens of the civil script produced for Peter I
, forms of and я were grouped together; Peter deleted 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 /ja/ (which is not a reflex of ę in Bulgarian), retaining its use for /jɐ/ but was no longer used for other purposes; this is its function today.
(see IPA consonants)
Ya is encoded as follows:
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, the civil script variant of Old Cyrillic Little Yus . Among modern Slavonic languages it is used by Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
, Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
and Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
to represent both the combination /ja/ in initial or post-vocalic position and /a/ after a palatalised consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
; in Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
the vowel sound is reduced to /ɐ/ in unstressed syllables, and is pronounced /ɤ̞/ in stressed verb and definite article endings. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
and many Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
, Caucasian
Languages of the Caucasus
The languages of the Caucasus are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea....
and Turkic languages
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
of the former Soviet Union. In early manuscripts is sometimes used as a numeral with the value 900 (more usually represented by ); this results from its close resemblance to sampi
Sampi
Sampi is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It was used in addition to the classical 24 letters of the alphabet to denote some type of a sibilant sound, probably or , in some eastern Ionic dialects of ancient Greek in the 6th and 5th centuries BC...
as it appears in contemporary Greek manuscripts.
History
In Serbia, [ę] became [e] at a very early period and the letter ceased to be used, being replaced by e
E
E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...
.
In Bulgaria the situation is complicated by the fact that dialects differ and that there were different orthographic systems in use, but broadly speaking [ę] became [e] in most positions, but in some circumstances it merged with [ǫ], 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
Yus
Little Yus and Big Yus , or Jus, are letters of the Cyrillic script, representing two Common Slavonic nasal vowels in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Each can occur in iotified form , formed as ligatures with the letter Decimal I...
, was governed as much by orthographical convention as by phonetic value or etymology.
Among the Eastern Slavs, [ę] was denasalised, probably to [æ], 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
Meletius Smotrytsky
Meletius Smotrytsky , né Maksym Herasymovytch was a Ruthenian linguist from Galicia, author and religious activist. Son of the famous Ukrainian religious and political activist Herasym Smotrytsky. He was educated in Ostroh and Vilnius, as well as Leipzig, Wittenberg and Nuremberg...
’s grammar of 1619 accordingly lists “”; 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.
Peter I of Russia
Peter the Great, Peter I or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov Dates indicated by the letters "O.S." are Old Style. All other dates in this article are New Style. ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his half-brother, Ivan V...
, forms of and я were grouped together; Peter deleted 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
Nayden Gerov
Nayden Gerov , born Nayden Gerov Hadzhidobrevich February 23, 1823, Koprivshtitsa–October 9, 1900, Plovdiv) was a Bulgarian linguist, folklorist, writer and public figure during the Bulgarian National Revival....
, 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 /ja/ (which is not a reflex of ę in Bulgarian), retaining its use for /jɐ/ but was no longer used for other purposes; this is its function today.
Related letters and other similar characters
: Cyrillic letter Little Yus: Cyrillic letter Iotated A : Latin letter small capital reversed R, used in phonetics to represent the epiglottal trillEpiglottal trill
In the epiglottal trill, the larynx is raised and the pharynx constricted, so that the epiglottis vibrates instead of the vocal cords. In the related aryepiglottal trill, the arytenoid cartilages vibrate....
(see IPA consonants)
- R r : Latin letter RRR is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R...
Computing codes
Uniquely, Unicode provides separate code-points for the Old Cyrillic and civil script forms of this letter; other encodings do not. A number of Old Cyrillic fonts developed before the publication of Unicode 5.1 placed Iotified A Ꙗ ꙗ at the code points for Я я 042F, 044F; this was strictly incorrect even then (since ꙗ was not yet included in Unicode, it should have been placed in the Private Use Area); since Unicode 5.1 the code-points for Iotified A Ꙗ ꙗ are A656, A657 and it should not be encoded anywhere else.Ya is encoded as follows:
| character | Я | я | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER YA | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER YA | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1071 | 042F | 1103 | 044F |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
208 175 | D0 AF | 209 143 | D1 8F |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Я | Я | я | я |
| KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters... and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,... |
241 | F1 | 209 | D1 |
| Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:... |
224 | E0 | 222 | DE |
| Code page 866 Code page 866 Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87... |
159 | 9F | 239 | EF |
| Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages... |
223 | DF | 255 | FF |
| ISO-8859-5 | 207 | CF | 239 | EF |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 159 | 9F | 223 | DF |