Ya (Cyrillic)
Cyrillic letter Ya | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ꙕ | Ю̂ | Ꙗ | Я̈ | Я̂ | Я̨ | |||
Ԙ | Ѥ | Ѧ | Ꙙ | Ѫ | Ꙛ | Ѩ | Ꙝ | |
Ѭ | Ѯ | Ѱ | Ѳ | Ѵ | Ѷ | Ꙟ |
Ya, Ia or Ja (Я я; italics: Я я) is a letter of the
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
In non-stressed positions, the
History
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
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
It was in
In the specimens of the
Use in loanwords and transcriptions
In Russian, the letter has little use in
.Although [æ] is a distinctive pronunciation of ⟨я⟩ in Russian, the letter is almost never used to transcribe that sound, unlike
Related letters and other similar characters
- Ѧ ѧ: Cyrillic letter Little Yus
- Ꙗ ꙗ: Cyrillic letter Iotated A
- ᴙ : Latin letter small capital reversed R, used informally in phonetics to represent the epiglottal trill (see IPA consonants)
-  â: Latin letter  - a Romanian and Vietnamese letter
- R r: Latin letter R
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.
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
- Faux Cyrillic
- Toys "R" Us, a toy store that uses the "Я" in its logo.
References
- ^ Грамматіки Славе́нскиѧ пра́вилное Сѵ́нтаґма, Jevje, 1619, sign.Аг҃
- ^ Любомир Андрейчин, Из историята на нашето езиково строителство, София, 1977, pp.151–165
- ^ According to the Unicode FAQ "characters that are not yet in the standard need to be represented by codepoints in the Private Use Area"