Iotated A () is a letter of the
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...
, used today only in
Church Slavonic. It is unusual among early Cyrillic letters in having no direct counterpart in
Glagolitic
The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...
: Ⱑ (
jat’) is used for both /ě/ and /ja/. Accordingly, many early Cyrillic texts (particularly those with Glagolitic antecedents) may use for both these purposes; this practice continues into the fourteenth century, but is much more common in the South Slavonic than the East Slavonic area. Nevertheless, is attested in the earliest extant Cyrillic writings, including for example the ''
Codex Suprasliensis
The Codex Suprasliensis is a 10th-century Cyrillic literary monument, the largest extant Old Church Slavonic canon manuscript and the oldest Slavic literary work in Poland. As of September 20, 2007, it is on UNESCO's Memory of the World list.
The ...
'' and ''
Savvina Kniga'' - this was not supported to other fonts in other applications.
It continued in use in Serbian until the orthographical reforms of
Vuk Karadžić
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić ( sr-Cyrl, Вук Стефановић Караџић, ; 6 November 1787 (26 October OS)7 February 1864) was a Serbian philologist, anthropologist and linguist. He was one of the most important reformers of the moder ...
, and in Bulgarian (where it also acquired a
civil script
The Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries.
Early changes
...
glyph variant) until the late nineteenth century. Among the Eastern Slavs, the denasalisation of
probably to
and the subsequent coalescence of this sound with the /a/ phoneme meant that the letter
Ѧ acquired the same function as , and the two came to be regarded as variants of the same letter. This is still the case in modern Church Slavonic, where, broadly speaking, is used initially and Ѧ elsewhere, though exceptionally they may be used to make other distinctions, such as that between 'tongue' and 'people'.
[Иеромонах Алипий (Гаманович), ''Грамматика церковно-славянского языка,'' С-Петербург, 1997, p.18]
Image:Iotified A2.png, Iotated A, both capital and lowercase forms (variant of civil script).
Image:Evolution of cursive Cyrillic iotated a, small yus, and ya.png, Evolution of iotated A and Little Yus.
Image:Ukrainian ia.JPG, Lowercase form of iotated a (Ukrainian variant).
Computing codes
{{charmap
, A656, name1=Cyrillic Capital Letter
Iotified A
, A657, name2=Cyrillic Small Letter
Iotified A
References
External links
CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER IOTIFIED A(
U+A656) on ScriptSource.org
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IOTIFIED A(
U+A657) on ScriptSource.org
Cyrillic ligatures