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Small Yus Ⱔ

Glagolitic Letters

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Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius

Small Yus is the thirty-sixth letter of Glagolitic and writes a nasal front vowel, one of the two nasal vowels that Old Church Slavonic had and that almost every later Slavic language lost, Polish being the principal exception. Because the nasals were lost so early and so widely, the yus letters are among the strongest evidence that the Slavonic written down in the ninth century was a real spoken language and not an artificial construction: nobody devising a liturgical language after the fact would have invented sounds their own speech no longer had. The letter has no numeral value. It carries no numeral value, standing beyond the end of the run of letters the alphabet counts.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Small Yus's own description discusses the lost nasal vowel it records, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Small Yus's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Attributions
Associated Sound
A nasal front vowel, the sound written by Slavists as a nasal e 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2
Place of Origin
Byzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1
Position
The thirty-seventh letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The nasal vowels the yus letters record were lost in almost every later Slavic language, so their presence in the earliest orthography is evidence for the antiquity of the texts that use them 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Learn More
Small Yus: The Glagolitic Letter

Small yus writes a nasal vowel, the front member of the pair the Slavonic tradition calls the yuses, and it carries no numeral value.

Old Church Slavonic had two nasal vowels, a front one and a back one, inherited from an earlier stage of Slavic in which certain vowels followed by a nasal consonant had fused into a single nasalised sound. The alphabet gives each a letter, and the letters are among the most characteristic features of the script.

The sounds did not survive. Every Slavic language except Polish lost the nasal vowels, denasalising them into ordinary vowels at various dates, so an early Slavonic manuscript records a distinction that almost no living Slavic speaker makes. That is precisely what makes the letters valuable: a word written with a yus can be traced to an original nasal vowel even where every descendant language has lost it, and the correspondences between the yus letters and the vowels of the modern languages are a standard tool of comparative Slavic work.

The name is opaque and the reference literature records it without an etymology, in this script and in Cyrillic alike.

The letter carries no numeral in either script. Greek had no nasal vowels and so had no letter and no number to lend, and the Glagolitic count had already ended some way earlier in the order. The nasal signs are among the most purely Slavic parts of the alphabet, invented for sounds that no script in the Mediterranean world had ever needed to write.

Small Yus and What the Nasal Vowels Preserve

The nasal vowels are the strongest argument that the Slavonic alphabets were designed by someone who listened carefully to the language. The sounds are not obvious to a speaker of Greek, they had no Greek letters and no Greek parallel, and a designer working carelessly would have written them with a vowel followed by a nasal consonant and lost the distinction. Instead both alphabets give them signs of their own, and the manuscripts use those signs consistently enough that the distribution can be studied.

That consistency is what makes the letters usable as evidence. Because Polish retained the nasal vowels and the other Slavic languages did not, a word written with a yus in a ninth or tenth century South Slavic text can be matched against a Polish word a thousand years later and against the denasalised forms everywhere else, and the whole set of correspondences falls out. Reconstructing the parent language depends on such chains.

The letters also date manuscripts. As the nasal vowels were lost in the South Slavic area the scribes began to confuse the yuses with the plain vowels they had merged into, and the pattern of confusion in a text is one of the standard indicators of when and where it was copied. A manuscript that keeps them apart is either early or conservative, and telling which is its own problem.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived from This

Little Yus Ѧ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. The little yus writes the nasal front vowel, paired with the big yus's back vowel, and is generally read as adapted from the Glagolitic small yus. The same dispute that applies to big yus applies here: agreement that Cyrillic drew on Glagolitic for this sign, no agreement on whether the Glagolitic form itself has a traceable outside model or is an original invention of its own alphabet's creator.

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

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Small Yus belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.

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

Related To

Cyril of Thessalonica, Historical Figures
Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik
Little Yus Ѧ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Little 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.)
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
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque Glagolitic letter names, fritu, heru, tsi and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

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 the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close 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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