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Alphabet Letters

Yery Ы

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

Yery is the thirtieth letter of Cyrillic and writes the high unrounded vowel that survives as Russian y and Polish y. The sign is a compound rather than a simple letter, joining the back jer to one of the i letters, and its name reflects that composition. It has no numeral value. A vowel built out of two other signs is a piece of evidence about how the Slavic alphabets were made, since a maker inventing freely would have had no need to compose it, and it is one of the details cited in discussions of how the scripts handled a vowel system Greek could not describe. It remains in the modern Russian and Belarusian alphabets, still written as a compound of two signs rather than as a simple letter.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yery's own description discusses the composed shape of the sign, 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
Yery's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Attributions
Associated Sound
The vowel y, a high central or back unrounded vowel 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 thirtieth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Yery's compound shape, joining the back jer to one of the i letters, is itself evidence for how the Slavic alphabets handled a vowel system Greek had no way to describe, since a maker inventing freely would have had no need to build the sign out of two others. 1
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Yery: A Vowel Written as Two Letters

Yery stands thirtieth and writes the vowel that Slavists transcribe as y, a high back unrounded vowel still present in Russian, Polish and several other Slavic languages. It carries no numeral value.

It is not a single sign in the early alphabet. It is written as a compound, the back jer followed by an i, and the two elements stayed visibly separate in the manuscripts long enough that alphabet lists disagree about whether to count it as a letter at all. Some manuscripts use izhe rather than the decimal i as the second element. Glagolitic writes the same vowel as a compound too, so what the two scripts share here is a strategy rather than a letter.

The compound spelling is not arbitrary. It encodes an analysis: this vowel is what an i becomes after an unsoftened consonant, and the spelling says so by writing the mark of unsoftening in front of the i. Whether that analysis is correct is still argued in modern linguistics, which is the subject of the companion article.

The letter survives in Russian, Belarusian and several other modern alphabets, still written as a compound shape, still doing the same work. In Ukrainian the corresponding letter has a different shape and a different history.

Is Yery a Vowel of Its Own?

Whether the vowel this letter writes is a distinct unit of the sound system, or a variant of i conditioned by the consonant in front of it, is one of the longest running arguments in Slavic phonology, and the alphabet took a side more than a thousand years before the argument started.

The case for treating it as a variant is distributional. In Russian it never appears after a soft consonant and i never appears after a hard one, so the two are in complementary distribution: knowing the consonant tells you which vowel follows, and no pair of words is distinguished by the choice alone in ordinary circumstances. On that reasoning the two are one thing wearing two coats, and the difference belongs to the consonant.

The case for treating it as its own unit is that speakers hear it as a separate vowel, that it behaves like one in borrowings and in words standing alone, and that the complementary distribution has exceptions once the whole vocabulary is admitted rather than the core of it.

The two positions are associated with the two great schools of Russian phonology, and the disagreement is a genuine one about how much of a sound system belongs to consonants and how much to vowels, not a quarrel over terminology.

The alphabet is a witness on one side. Writing this vowel as the hard sign plus i is precisely the analysis that treats it as an i modified by an unsoftened consonant, and whoever devised that spelling in the ninth century had reached that conclusion by ear alone.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

I І, Alphabet Letters

The second element of the yery compound is the letter i. Some manuscripts use izhe instead.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Yer Ъ, Alphabet Letters

Yery is written as a compound whose first element is the back jer. Glagolitic writes the same vowel as a compound too, so the correspondence between the two scripts runs between compounds rather than between single letters.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Yery 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

Yeri Ⱐ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Yery 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.)
Yeri Ⱐ, Alphabet Letters

Yery answers to Glagolitic Yeri: both write the high unrounded vowel with a compound sign joining the back jer to an i letter. Neither script numbers the letter.

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
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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