Iotified A Ꙗ

This letter stands thirty fourth and writes the sequence of a glide followed by the vowel a. It carries no numeral value.

Its construction is visible in its shape: it is a ligature of the sign for the glide and the letter azu, written joined. That makes it one of the several compound signs in the alphabet whose parts a reader can still see, and the alphabet lists disagree about whether such compounds should be counted as letters at all, which is one reason the total given for Early Cyrillic varies between authorities.

Its history is unusual among the iotified letters, because the sequence it writes never went out of use. Every Slavic language still has it, and every Cyrillic alphabet still needs a way of writing it. What changed is which sign does the job.

In the East Slavic area this letter fell together with the little yus, whose nasal vowel had been lost, and the two collapsed into one. The shape that survived was the little yus and the function that survived was this letter's. The modern Russian letter for ya is therefore a case of a sign and its meaning coming from different ancestors, which is set out in the companion article. This letter itself did not survive into any modern alphabet, although what it wrote is written every day.

The modern Cyrillic letter for ya has an origin story that people regularly get half right, and the half that gets left out is the interesting one.

Old Church Slavonic had two letters that came to matter here. One was this iotified a, a ligature writing the glide plus a. The other was the little yus, writing a nasal front vowel, a sound with no glide in it at all.

In the East Slavic area the nasal vowels were lost early, and the nasal front vowel fell in with the sequence the iotified a wrote. Two letters were now writing one thing. What happened next was decided by the pen rather than by any principle: the little yus was the simpler shape to write and it won, while the sound it now stood for was the one the iotified a had carried.

So the modern letter descends in shape from a letter for a nasal vowel and in function from a ligature for a glide, and neither ancestor alone explains it. Anyone tracing it back through the shape lands on the nasals and concludes that Russian once had them, which is true but is not what this letter is evidence for. Anyone tracing it back through the sound lands on the iotified a and finds a shape that looks nothing like the modern letter.

Letters merge like this more often than tidy histories suggest, and the merger is usually invisible afterwards, because a script preserves only what survived and not what it displaced.