Ya (Cyrillic)

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Cyrillic letter Ya
Ю̂Я̈Я̂Я̨
ԘѤѦѪѨ
ѬѮѰѲѴѶ

Ya, Ia or Ja (Я я; italics: Я я) is a letter of the

civil script variant of Old Cyrillic Little Yus (Ѧ ѧ), and possibly Iotated A (Ꙗ ꙗ). Among modern Slavic languages, it is used in the East Slavic languages and Bulgarian. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian and many Uralic, Caucasian and Turkic languages
of the former Soviet Union.

Pronunciation

The iotated vowel is pronounced /ja/ in initial or post-vocalic positions, like the English pronunciation of ⟨ya⟩ in "yard".

When ⟨я⟩ follows a soft consonant, no /j/ sound occurs between the consonant and the vowel.

The exact pronunciation of the

vowel sound of ⟨я⟩ depends also on the following sound by allophony in the Slavic languages. In Russian, before a soft consonant, it is [æ], like in the English "cat". If a hard consonant follows ⟨я⟩ or none, the result is an open vowel, usually [a
]. This difference does not exist in the other Cyrillic languages.

In non-stressed positions, the

yakanye dialects ⟨я⟩ undergo no reduction unlike other instances of the /a/ phoneme (represented with the letter ⟨а⟩). In Bulgarian
, the vowel sound is reduced to /ɐ/ in unstressed syllables and is pronounced /ɤ̞/ in both stressed verb and definite article endings.

History

Little Yus

The letter ѧ, known as little jus (yus) (Bulgarian: малка носовка, Russian: юс малый) originally stood for a front nasal vowel, conventionally transcribed as ę. The history of the letter (in both Church Slavonic and vernacular texts) varies according to the development of this sound in the different areas where Cyrillic was used.

In Serbia, [ɛ̃] became [e] at a very early period and the letter ѧ ceased to be used, being replaced by e. In Bulgaria the situation is complicated by the fact that dialects differ and that there were different orthographic systems in use, but broadly speaking [ɛ̃] became [ɛ] in most positions, but in some circumstances it merged with [ǫ], particularly in inflexional endings, e.g. the third person plural ending of the present tense of certain verbs such as правѧтъ (Modern Bulgarian правят). The letter continued to be used, but its distribution, particularly in regard to the other yuses, was governed as much by orthographical convention as by phonetic value or etymology.

After the Bulgarian language adopted the

civil script
, the sound /ja/ would come to be represented by the letter я, despite etymological я being pronounced /ɛ/.

Among the Eastern Slavs, [ɛ̃] was denasalised, probably to [æ], which palatalised the preceding consonant; after palatalisation became phonemic, the /æ/ phoneme merged with /a/, and ѧ henceforth indicated /a/ after a palatalised consonant, or else, in initial or post-vocalic position, /ja/. However, Cyrillic already had a character with this function, namely

is used initially and ѧ elsewhere. (In fact he also distinguishes the feminine form of the accusative plural of the third person pronoun ѧ҆̀ from the masculine and neuter ꙗ҆̀.) This reflects the practice of earlier scribes and was further codified by the Muscovite printers of the seventeenth century (and is continued in modern Church Slavonic). However, in vernacular and informal writing of the period, the two letters may be used completely indiscriminately.

It was in

Russian cursive (skoropis') writing of this time that the letter acquired its modern form: the left-hand leg of ѧ was progressively shortened, eventually disappearing altogether, while the foot of the middle leg shifted towards the left, producing the я shape.

A page with the letter forms for [ja] (first line) with Tsar Peter's choice of Я instead of Ѧ or

In the specimens of the

Peter I, forms of ꙗ, ѧ and я were grouped together; Peter removed the first two, leaving only я in the modern alphabet, and its use in Russian remains the same to the present day. It was similarly adopted for the standardised orthographies of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, both Old Cyrillic and civil scripts were used for printing, with я in the latter corresponding to ѧ in the former, and there were various attempts to standardise the orthography, of which some, such as the Plovdiv school exemplified by Nayden Gerov, were more conservative, essentially preserving the Middle Bulgarian distribution of the letter, others attempted to rationalise spelling on more phonetic principles, and one project in 1893 proposed abolishing the letter я altogether.[2]
By the early twentieth century, under Russian influence, я came to be used for /ja/ (which is not a reflex of ę in Bulgarian), retaining its use for /jɐ/ but was no longer used for other purposes; this is its function today.

Use in loanwords and transcriptions

In Russian, the letter has little use in

dark l pronunciation in ⟨ла⟩. ⟨Я⟩ is also used to transcribe Romanian ⟨ea⟩, pronounced as [e̯a]
.

Although [æ] is a distinctive pronunciation of ⟨я⟩ in Russian, the letter is almost never used to transcribe that sound, unlike

Apple tree
"

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

Unicode provides separate code-points for the Old Cyrillic and civil script forms of this letter. A number of Old Cyrillic fonts developed before the publication of Unicode 5.1 placed iotated A (Ꙗ/ꙗ) at the code points for Ya (Я/я) instead of the Private Use Area,[3] but since Unicode 5.1, iotated A has been encoded separately from Ya.


Character information
Preview Я я
Unicode name CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER YA CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER YA
Encodings decimal hex dec hex
Unicode 1071 U+042F 1103 U+044F
UTF-8 208 175 D0 AF 209 143 D1 8F
Numeric character reference Я Я я я
Named character reference Я я
KOI8-R and KOI8-U 241 F1 209 D1
Code page 855 224 E0 222 DE
Code page 866 159 9F 239 EF
Windows-1251 223 DF 255 FF
ISO-8859-5
207 CF 239 EF
Macintosh Cyrillic
159 9F 223 DF

See also

References

  1. ^ Грамматіки Славе́нскиѧ пра́вилное Сѵ́нтаґма, Jevje, 1619, sign.Аг҃
  2. ^ Любомир Андрейчин, Из историята на нашето езиково строителство, София, 1977, pp.151–165
  3. ^ According to the Unicode FAQ "characters that are not yet in the standard need to be represented by codepoints in the Private Use Area"

External links

  • The dictionary definition of Я at Wiktionary
  • The dictionary definition of я at Wiktionary