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Big Yus Ѫ

Cyrillic Letters

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Origin Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire

Big Yus is the thirty-eighth letter of Cyrillic and writes the nasal back vowel, the second of the two nasals of Old Church Slavonic. It survived in Bulgarian orthography, with a changed value, until the spelling reform of 1945, and it is used in modern Bulgarian typography and heraldry as a marker of the older written tradition. Together with the little yus it shows most clearly what the Slavic alphabets had to do that a relabelled Greek series could not: supply signs for a vowel system Greek had no means of writing at all. It has no numeral value, standing outside the Greek series entirely. Both yuses are among the letters Cyrillic took from Glagolitic rather than from the Byzantine hand, since Greek had nothing to lend for a nasal vowel.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Big Yus's own description discusses the lost nasal back vowel it records, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Big Yus's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Attributions
Associated Sound
A nasal back vowel, the sound Slavists write as a nasal o 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire 2
Place of Origin
The First Bulgarian Empire, in the school of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, with Preslav and Ohrid the two centres most often named 2
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: one letter to a sound, built on Greek uncial letterforms with additional signs, several of them taken from Glagolitic, for the Slavonic sounds Greek could not write 1
Position
The thirty-eighth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Big Yus and the little yus together show most clearly what the Slavic alphabets had to do that a relabelled Greek series could not, supply signs for a vowel system Greek had no means of writing at all; both are among the letters Cyrillic took from Glagolitic rather than from the Byzantine hand. 1
Learn More
The Big Yus: The Back Nasal

The big yus stands thirty eighth and writes the nasal back vowel, the second of the two nasals of Old Church Slavonic. It carries no numeral value.

Its shape is the most elaborate in the alphabet, and its name is a Slavist's label distinguishing it by size from the front nasal rather than a word of the language.

Its history is the most interesting of the four yus letters because it did not simply disappear. In Bulgarian the nasal quality of the vowel was lost but the vowel itself was not: it developed into a distinct non-nasal sound, and the letter went on being written for it. That kept the big yus in active daily use in a national orthography until 1945, roughly a thousand years after the sound it was made for had ceased to exist anywhere.

Elsewhere it went with the nasals. Russian lost it, Serbian lost it, and no modern alphabet outside the Bulgarian case retained it.

The Bulgarian episode is the subject of the companion article, and it is worth attention because it is the clearest example in this alphabet of a letter surviving by changing what it means rather than by being useful for what it originally said.

The Serbian recension shows the other way a letter can outlive its sound. By the time Serbian manuscripts begin, the back nasal had already resolved into a plain u in that area, so a Serbian scribe writing the big yus was following a spelling convention rather than recording anything he said. Where the letter appears in such a manuscript it is evidence about the exemplar being copied and about the training of the copyist, and it is no evidence at all about the language of the place the copy was made in. Distinguishing those two kinds of testimony is most of the work in dating a Slavonic hand.

The Big Yus in Bulgarian, and the Reform of 1945

Bulgarian kept the big yus longer than any other language kept any letter of the original Slavonic set that had lost its sound, and the way it ended is instructive.

The nasal back vowel had become, in Bulgarian, a central vowel with no nasality in it. The letter went on being written for that vowel, but Bulgarian also had another letter available for the same sound, the back jer, which had itself been repurposed after the reduced vowels fell. Two letters, one sound, and the distribution between them settled by etymology and by rule rather than by anything a speaker could hear. It is the same situation that produced the on and omega pair, the fert and fita pair and the yat problem, arriving by a different route.

The Bulgarian orthographic reform of 1945 removed the big yus and gave its work to the back jer, and removed yat at the same time. As in Russia in 1918, the linguistic arguments had been made for decades and the political will to enforce them arrived suddenly, and as in Russia the reform is remembered by many as a political act because of who signed it rather than because of what it contained.

Yat was the harder of the two, because its reflexes differ across the country and choosing what to write instead meant choosing between regional pronunciations. The big yus was the easier, because everyone agreed what it now sounded like. That is a general rule about spelling reform: a letter with one pronunciation can be abolished quietly, and a letter with two cannot be abolished at all without someone losing.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Big Yus Ⱘ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. The big yus writes the nasal back vowel, a sound Greek script had no sign for. Cyrillic paleographers broadly agree its shape was adapted from the Glagolitic sign for the same vowel, but do not agree on much beyond that: some trace the Glagolitic form itself back to a Greek ligature, others to an independent Slavic invention, so calling the Cyrillic sign derived from Glagolitic settles only the immediate step and not the letter's ultimate origin.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Derived from This

Iotified Big Yus Ѭ, Alphabet Letters

The iotified big yus is built on the big yus with the glide sign in front of it.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Big Yus is a letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which was assembled to write Old Church Slavonic and which takes its letter names from that language.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Related To

Big Yus Ⱘ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Big Yus writes the same sound and stands in the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter. Which of the two Slavonic scripts came first, and how much either owes the other, is argued rather than settled.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Big Yus Ⱘ, Alphabet Letters

Big Yus answers to Glagolitic Big Yus: the same nasal back vowel and the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Little Yus Ѧ, Alphabet Letters

The little yus and the big yus are the two nasal vowels of Old Church Slavonic, front and back. Nearly every later Slavic language lost both, Polish being the principal exception.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996on the Slavic alphabets, their letters and their numeral systemsView the Source
2. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius
Francis Dvornik, Rutgers University Press, 1970on the Moravian mission and the making of the Slavic lettersView the Source
The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Consortiumon the encoded characters, their names and their block assignmentView the Source
Old Church Slavonic Grammar
Horace G. Lunt, Mouton de Gruyter, 2001View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque letter names at the end of the Slavic alphabets, fert, kher, tsy and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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