Iotified Little Yus Ѩ

This letter stands thirty seventh and writes a glide followed by the nasal front vowel. It carries no numeral value.

It is built on the little yus with the glide sign in front of it, which puts it in the same class as the iotified a and the iotified e: a compound whose parts remain visible, counted as a letter in some alphabet lists and as a spelling in others.

The sequence it writes is a real one in Old Church Slavonic, occurring at the start of words and after vowels where the plain little yus occurs after consonants, the same distribution that governs the whole iotified series. What makes this letter and its companion in the big yus series difficult is that the sequences are uncommon, so the letters are uncommon, and a sign that appears rarely is a sign scribes copy carelessly.

The manuscripts confirm it. Confusion between the iotified and plain yus letters begins early and is widespread, which means the evidence for how this letter was written, and in some cases for whether a given text used it at all, is thinner than for any other part of the alphabet.

Nothing of it survives in a modern alphabet. The nasal vowel it depended on was lost across almost the whole Slavic area, and a letter whose sound has gone and whose shape was already unstable has very little to hold on with.

The alphabet as it stands here has four yus letters: a front nasal and a back nasal, each with a plain and an iotified form. That is a complete and symmetrical set, and it lasted almost nowhere.

The reduction happened in stages and for different reasons in different places. The nasal vowels themselves were lost early in the East Slavic and most of the South Slavic area, which removed the reason for having any of the four. Where they survived longest, the surviving letters were reallocated: Bulgarian kept the big yus in its orthography until the middle of the twentieth century, writing by then a vowel that was no longer nasal at all. And in the East Slavic tradition the little yus was kept for its shape and given the work of a different letter entirely.

The iotified pair fared worst. They were the rarest to begin with, they were the most easily confused with their plain counterparts, and when the nasal vowels went there was nothing left for them to be reassigned to.

The pattern is a general one for alphabets that outlive the sound system they were cut for. Letters are not removed in proportion to how redundant they are. They survive according to how useful their shapes are for other purposes, how much of the numeral system depends on them, and how strongly the institutions using them resist change. Sound change proposes; orthography, printing and the church dispose.