Yery

File:Karion Istomin's alphabet Yery.jpg

Yery, from Karion Istomin's 1694 alphabet book

Yeru or Eru (Ы ы; italics: Ы ы or Ы ы; italics: Ы ы), usually called Y in modern Russian or Yery or Ery historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the close central unrounded vowel (more rear or upper than i) after non-palatalised (hard) consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets.

The letter is usually romanised ⟨y⟩, such that the family name is usually written Krylov in English and most other West European languages. That spelling matches the Latin alphabet used for Polish, whose letter ⟨y⟩ represents the same sound. Similarly, ⟨ы⟩ is used for ⟨y⟩ in the cyrillisation of Polish, such that the name appears as in Russian. Note, however, that the letter ⟨y⟩ also appears in romanisation of other Russian letters both in isolation (such as ⟨й⟩, Template:Translit) and as part of digraphs (such as ⟨я⟩, Template:Translit).

In Rusyn, ⟨ы⟩ represents the close-mid back unrounded vowel . In most Turkic languages that use Cyrillic, such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz, ⟨ы⟩ is used to represent the close back unrounded vowel /ɯ/ instead.

Origin

File:Yeri.png

The letter Yery in several fonts

File:29-Russian alphabet-ы.svg

Cursive Yery

Like many other Cyrillic letters, it was originally from a ligature ꙑ (which is represented in Unicode as Yeru with Back Yer), formed from Yer ⟨ъ⟩ and Dotted I ⟨і⟩ (formerly written either dotless or with two dots) or Izhe (⟨и⟩ which formerly resembled ⟨н⟩). In Medieval manuscripts, it is almost always found as ⟨ъі⟩ or ⟨ъи⟩. The modern form ⟨ы⟩ first occurred in South Slavic manuscripts following the loss of palatalization of word-final and preconsonantal consonants, so the letters ⟨ъ⟩ and ⟨ь⟩ became confused; since the end of the 14th century, ⟨ы⟩ came to be used in East Slavic manuscripts.

Usage

While vowel letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may be divided into iotated and non-iotated pairs (for example, ⟨о⟩ and ⟨ё⟩ both represent , the latter denoting a preceding palatalised consonant), ⟨ы⟩ is more complicated. It appears only after hard consonants, its phonetic value differs from ⟨и⟩, and there is some scholarly disagreement as to whether or not ⟨ы⟩ and ⟨и⟩ denote different phonemes. This confusion may stem from the fact that the phonetic value of ⟨ы⟩ is sometimes attached to ⟨и⟩, particularly after certain hard consonants. Examples include words such as or - despite being written with ⟨и⟩, they are pronounced as if ⟨ы⟩ had been written.

In Russian

There are no native Russian words that begin with ⟨ы⟩ (except for the specific verb : "to say the ⟨ы⟩-sound"), but there are many proper and common nouns of non-Russian origin (including some geographical names in Russia) that begin with it: Kim Jong-un () and Ŭlchi Mundŏk (), a Korean military leader; and Ytyk-Kyuyol (), Ygyatta (), a village and a river in Sakha (Yakutia) Republic respectively.

In Ukrainian

In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery is not used since the language lacks the sound . In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery merged with [i] and was phased out in the second half of the 19th century. According to the Ukrainian academician Hryhoriy Pivtorak, the letter was replaced with so called "Cyrillic i" ⟨и⟩, which in Ukrainian represents the sound [ɪ], which appeared by the merger of the earlier sounds [ɨ] and [i]. Ukrainian also had newly developed the sound [i] from various origins, which is represented by ⟨i⟩ ("Cyrillic dotted i"). Yery could be found in several earlier versions of the Ukrainian writing system that were introduced in the 19th century among which were "Pavlovsky writing system", "Sloboda Ukraine (New) writing system", and "Yaryzhka".

In Rusyn

In Rusyn, it denotes [ɯ], a sound that is a bit harder than and similar to the Romanian sound î, which is also written â. In some cases, the letter may occur after palatalised consonants ( "blue", which never happens in Russian), and it often follows ⟨к⟩, ⟨г⟩, ⟨ґ⟩ and ⟨х⟩.

In Turkic languages

The letter ⟨ы⟩ is also used in Cyrillic-based alphabets of several Turkic and Mongolic languages (see the list) for a darker vowel [ɯ]. The corresponding letter in Latin-based scripts are ⟨ı⟩ (dotless I), I with bowl (Ь ь), and ⟨y⟩ (in Turkmen).

In Tuvan, the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.

In Mongolian

In Mongolian, yery is called (, "Sixty One Yery"). It is used as a suffix in a lot of words in the Mongolian language. ( "Mongolian Cyrillic Alphabet").

Related letters and other similar characters

• И и : Cyrillic letter I
• Й й : Cyrillic letter Short I
• Ъ ъ : Cyrillic letter Yer
• Ꙑ ꙑ : Cyrillic letter Yeru with back Yer
• Ь ь : Cyrillic letter Soft sign
• Ҍ ҍ : Cyrillic letter semisoft sign
• Ѣ ѣ : Cyrillic letter yat
• I ı : Latin letter Dotless I
• Ь ь : Latin letter I with bowl
• Ư ư : Latin letter U with horn, the 26th letter of the Vietnamese alphabet.
• Y y : Latin letter Y
• Ý ý : Latin letter Ý
• B b : Latin letter B (lowercase)
• L l : Latin letter L (lowercase)

References

• Russian: An interactive online reference grammar, by Dr Robert Beard

External links

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