Little Yus Ѧ

The little yus stands thirty sixth and writes a nasal front vowel, one of the two nasal vowels of Old Church Slavonic. It carries no numeral value, standing outside the Greek numeral series like every letter supplied for a sound Greek did not have.

Its name is a Slavist's label rather than a word of the language: little against big, distinguishing the front nasal from the back one. That naming pattern, descriptive rather than lexical, marks the letters that were added last and named by classification.

The sound it wrote is the single strongest piece of evidence for the character of the language the alphabet was made for, and the argument is set out in the companion article.

Its later career was decisive for the modern alphabets. In the East Slavic area the nasal vowel was lost and this letter fell together with the iotified a, and it was this letter's shape that survived the merger, simplified into what is now the Russian letter for ya. The letter therefore did not so much disappear as change what it meant while keeping its form, which is the opposite of what happened to most of its neighbours.

For anyone working on the history of the Slavic languages the letter is a key rather than a curiosity. A word written with the little yus in a Slavonic text can be matched against its descendants in the modern languages, where the nasal has usually resolved into a plain vowel and the nasality survives only in a related word or in a Polish cognate. The Slavonic spelling therefore recovers a stage of the word that no living language preserves intact, and a great deal of Slavic etymology is done by reading modern forms back against exactly these letters.

Old Church Slavonic had two nasal vowels, a front one and a back one, and gave each a letter. Almost every Slavic language since has lost them. Polish is the principal exception and still writes two nasal vowels today.

That combination of facts does a particular kind of work. A liturgical language that nobody speaks natively is always open to the suspicion of being a construction, assembled by scholars out of several dialects or out of theory, and the suspicion is not unreasonable given how many liturgical languages are exactly that. The nasal vowels are the answer to it.

Nobody constructing a written language in the ninth century would invent two vowels their own speech did not contain, give each a letter, and then write them consistently in the right places across a large body of translated text. The letters are used systematically, in positions that correspond regularly to nasal vowels reconstructed independently from the comparative evidence of the modern languages, and they line up with what Polish still has. The only economical explanation is that the people writing them were writing what they said.

That makes Old Church Slavonic a record of a real spoken tongue at a datable moment, which is why it matters far beyond liturgy. It is the earliest substantial written Slavic, and the reconstruction of Slavic prehistory rests on it heavily.

The yus letters are the load bearing part of that argument, and it is worth knowing which small marks on a manuscript page are carrying the weight.