Iotated A
Template:Short description Template:Infobox grapheme
Iotated A (<templatestyles src="Script/styles_slavonic.css" />Ꙗ, ꙗ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script, built as a ligature of the letters І and А, and used today only in Church Slavonic. It is unusual among early Cyrillic letters in having no direct counterpart in Glagolitic: Ⱑ (jat’) is used for both /ě/ and /ja/. Accordingly, many early Cyrillic texts (particularly those with Glagolitic antecedents) may use <templatestyles src="Script/styles_slavonic.css" />Ѣ for both these purposes; this practice continued into the fourteenth century, but was much more common in the South Slavonic than the East Slavonic area. Nevertheless, <templatestyles src="Script/styles_slavonic.css" />Ꙗ is attested in the earliest extant Cyrillic writings, including for example the Codex Suprasliensis and Savvina Kniga - this was not supported to other fonts in other applications.Template:Incomprehensible inline
It continued in use in Serbian until the orthographical reforms of Vuk Karadžić, and in Bulgarian (where it also acquired a civil script glyph variant) until the late nineteenth century.[1] However it was never included in the Russian civil script of Peter I. Among the Eastern Slavs, the denasalisation of [ę], probably to [æ], and the subsequent coalescence of this sound with the /a/ phoneme meant that the letter Ѧ acquired the same function as <templatestyles src="Script/styles_slavonic.css" />Ꙗ, 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, <templatestyles src="Script/styles_slavonic.css" />Ꙗ is used initially and Ѧ elsewhere, though exceptionally they may be used to make other distinctions, such as that between <templatestyles src="Script/styles_slavonic.css" />ѧ҆зы́къ 'tongue' and <templatestyles src="Script/styles_slavonic.css" />ꙗ҆зы́къ 'people'.[2]
-
Iotated A, both capital and lowercase forms (variant of civil script).
-
Evolution of iotated A and Little Yus.
-
Lowercase form of iotated a (Ukrainian variant).
In cursive, the letter was modified: the left side was gradually lost, turning only into a flourish, so it began to look like an 'а' with a 'с'-shaped tail at the top left (a similar metamorphosis occurred with the cursive 'Ю').[3]
Computing codes
References
External links
- CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER IOTIFIED A (
U+A656) on ScriptSource.org - CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IOTIFIED A (
U+A657) on ScriptSource.org