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Izhitsa or Izhica (Ѵ, ѵ; italics: ''Ѵ ѵ''; OCS: Ѷжица, Russian: Ижица,
Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...
: Іжиця) is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet and several later alphabets, usually the last in the row. It originates from the Greek letter upsilon (Y, υ) and was used in words and names derived from or via the Greek language, such as кѵрилъ (''kürilǔ'', "Cyril", from Greek Κύριλλος) or флаѵии (''flavii'', "Flavius", from Greek Φλάυιος). It represented the sounds or as normal letters и and в, respectively. The Glagolitic alphabet has a corresponding letter with the name ''izhitsa'' as well (Ⱛ, ⱛ). Also, izhitsa in its standard form or, most often, in a tailed variant (similar to Latin "y") was part of a digraph оѵ/оу representing the sound . The digraph is known as Cyrillic " uk", and today's Cyrillic letter u originates from its simplified form. The letter's traditional name, ''izhitsa'' (ижица), is explained as a
diminutive A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment. A (abbreviated ) is a word-formati ...
either of the word иго (''igo'', "yoke"), due to the letter's shape, or of иже (''izhe'', "which"), the name of the main Cyrillic and Glagolitic letters for the same sound, . The numeral value of Cyrillic izhitsa is 400. Glagolitic izhitsa has no numeral value. Church Slavonic editions printed in Russia use a tailed variant of the letter for the numeral purpose, whereas editions from Serbia or Romania (including books in the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet), as well as early printed books from Ukraine, prefer a basic form of the letter without the tail.


Russian

In the
Russian language Russian (russian: русский язык, russkij jazyk, link=no, ) is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the First language, native language of the Russians, and belongs to the Indo-European langua ...
, the use of izhitsa became progressively rarer during the 18th and 19th centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was only one word with relatively stable spelling that included the letter izhitsa: мѵро (''miro'', "
myrrh Myrrh (; from Semitic, but see '' § Etymology'') is a gum-resin extracted from a number of small, thorny tree species of the genus ''Commiphora''. Myrrh resin has been used throughout history as a perfume, incense and medicine. Myrrh mi ...
") and its derivatives. In the documents of the spelling reform of 1917–1918, izhitsa is not mentioned at all, although the statement that it was canceled at that time, along with decimal i, yat and fita, is not only widespread, but also reflected in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In fact, Ѵ fell out of use in the civil alphabet gradually, under the influence not only of the general direction of changes in the spelling of the Russian language, but also of the displacement of words and texts on religious topics from the civil press. At the same time, for example, steam locomotives of the Ѵ series were produced until 1931 and were in operation until they were decommissioned in the 1950s.


Serbian

The traditional spelling of
Serbian Serbian may refer to: * someone or something related to Serbia, a country in Southeastern Europe * someone or something related to the Serbs, a South Slavic people * Serbian language * Serbian names See also

* * * Old Serbian (disambiguat ...
was more conservative; it preserved all etymologically motivated izhitsas in words of Greek origin. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić had reformed the
Serbian alphabet The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet ( sr, / , ) is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language, updated in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write standard modern Serbian, th ...
in the beginning of the nineteenth century and eliminated the letter, but the old spelling was used in some places as late as the 1880s.


(New) Church Slavonic

Izhitsa is still in use in the
Church Slavonic language Church Slavonic (, , literally "Church-Slavonic language"), also known as Church Slavic, New Church Slavonic or New Church Slavic, is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bosnia and Herzeg ...
. Like Greek upsilon, it can be pronounced as (like и), or as (like в). The basic distinction rule is simple: izhitsa with stress and/or aspiration marks is a vowel and therefore pronounced ; izhitsa without diacritical marks is a consonant and pronounced . Unstressed, -sounding izhitsas are marked with a special diacritical mark, the so-called ''kendema'' or ''kendima'' (from the Greek word κέντημα ). The shape of kendema over izhitsa may vary: in books of Russian origin, it typically looks like a double
grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...
or sometimes like a double
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...
. In older Serbian books, kendema most often looked like two dots (
trema Trema may refer to: * a List of Greek and Latin roots in English/P–Z#T, Greek and Latin root meaning ''hole'' * ''Tréma'', a word in French meaning diaeresis ** more generally, two dots (diacritic) * Trema (plant), ''Trema'' (plant), a genus of ...
) or might even be replaced by a surrogate combination of aspiration and acute. These shape distinctions (with the exception of the aspiration-acute combination) have no orthographical meaning and must be considered as just font style variations, thus the Unicode name "IZHITSA WITH DOUBLE GRAVE" is slightly misleading. Izhitsa with kendema (
majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
: Ѷ,
minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
: ѷ) is not a separate letter of the alphabet, but it may have personal position in computer encodings (e.g., Unicode). Historically, izhitsa with kendema corresponds to the Greek upsilon with trema (or διαλυτικά: Ϋ, ϋ). While in modern editions of ancient and modern Greek the trema is used only to prevent a digraph (as <ευ> versus <εϋ> ), Slavonic usage of kendema still continues that of many medieval Greek manuscripts, in which the " diaeresis" sign was often used simply to mark an upsilon or iota as such, irrespective of any other vowels (e.g. δϊαλϋτϊκά, which would not be correct by today's conventions). There might be no sign of information of izhitsa with double grave accent (
majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
: Ѷ,
minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
: ѷ), but only the unicode.


Romanian

Traditional orthography of the Romanian language used izhitsa in the same manner as Church Slavonic, with all the above-mentioned peculiarities. This writing system was used until about 1860 in Romania and until the 1910s in church books in Moldova.


Aleut

The Cyrillic letter izhitsa was also used historically in certain loanwords in the Cyrillic script version of Aleut.


Izhitsa as a replacement of a different character

In Russian typography, the capital form of izhitsa has traditionally been used instead of the Roman numeral V; this tradition survived several decades longer than izhitsa as a letter of the alphabet. The izhitsa is sometimes used in place of the new
IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...
symbol for the labiodental flap (ⱱ) because the signs are similar.


Computing codes

The tailed variant of izhitsa has no individual position in Unicode; instead, the characters and are supposed to represent it.


See also

* Ү ү : Cyrillic letter ue, used in various languages as a close front rounded vowel (/y/) * Ӱ ӱ : Cyrillic letter u with diaeresis, used in several languages as a close front rounded vowel (/y/)


Notes

{{Reflist


References


A Berdnikov and O Lapko, "Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode", EuroTEX ’99 Proceedings
September 1999 (
PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
) * F Lauritzen, Michael the Grammarian's irony about hypsilon: a step towards reconstructing Byzantine pronunciation, Byzantinoslavica 67 (2009) 231–240