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Alphabet Letters

Yo Ⱖ

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

Yo is the thirty-eighth letter of Glagolitic and writes a palatal glide followed by o. It belongs to the same set of glide-plus-vowel signs as yu and the iotated yuses, and it is rare, appearing in a limited part of the tradition rather than throughout. Its rarity is the reason it is sometimes omitted from printed tables of the alphabet, and it is one of the letters whose inclusion or exclusion accounts for the different totals given for the Glagolitic inventory in different reference works. It carries no numeral value and stands outside the counted series. Its shape belongs to the same family as the other glide-plus-vowel signs, joining the sign for the glide to the sign for the vowel it precedes.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yo's own description discusses its rarity in the manuscript tradition, 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
Yo'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
The sequence yo, a palatal glide followed by o 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-ninth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Yo's rarity, appearing in only a limited part of the tradition, is itself one of the reasons different reference works give different totals for the size of the Glagolitic inventory. 1
Learn More
Yo: The Glagolitic Letter

Yo writes the sequence of a glide followed by the vowel o, and it carries no numeral value. It belongs to the group of signs at the end of the Slavonic order that give single letters to combinations the language treated as units.

The sign is not common. The sequence it records is rarer in Old Church Slavonic than the corresponding sequences with u and with the nasal vowels, and a manuscript may use the letter only a handful of times or not at all. That rarity has consequences for the record: the form varies more between traditions than the forms of common letters do, and its place in the order is given slightly differently by different abecedaria.

The early Cyrillic alphabet as the atlas records it has no letter that answers to this one directly, which is why no counterpart is listed here. Cyrillic wrote glide sequences with its own set of signs, and the two inventories do not line up member for member in this part of the order. Where a counterpart cannot be identified with confidence the atlas leaves the pairing blank rather than making one, since a wrong correspondence reads on the page exactly like a right one.

No numeral attaches to the letter. It stands well past the end of the Glagolitic counted series, and there is no Greek letter behind it from which a value could have been inherited in the way the Cyrillic system inherits values, so the sign is unnumbered in every reckoning.

Yo and the Limits of Matching the Two Alphabets

For most of their length the two Slavonic alphabets can be laid side by side letter for letter. They share an order, a set of names and a set of sounds, and a reader can move along the two lists together from the first letter to somewhere past the twentieth without difficulty. At the end of the order that stops working.

The reason is that the Slavic material at the end of the alphabet is where each script was doing its own work. Greek supplied the frame for the first two thirds; after that both alphabets had to provide signs for affricates, reduced vowels, nasal vowels and glide sequences, and they did not make identical choices about which combinations deserved a letter of their own. One script may write with a single sign what the other writes with two, and one may have a letter the other simply lacks.

So a table of correspondences between the two alphabets is complete at the start and ragged at the end, and the ragged part is the interesting part, because it is where the design decisions are visible. The atlas records the correspondences it can support and leaves the rest unmatched. An unmatched letter is a piece of information about how the two scripts differ, and filling the gap for the sake of symmetry would destroy it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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 Yo 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
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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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.