Yus
766495
225284784
2008-07-12T21:54:03Z
OwenBlacker
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Unitalicised [[Cyrillic]]
{{Unreferenced|date=February 2008}}
{{Cyrillic alphabet navbox
| Heading = Cyrillic letter Yus
| Image = [[Image:Cyrillic letter Little Yus.png]]<br>[[Image:Cyrillic letter Big Yus.png]]<br>[[Image:Cyrillic letter Iotified Little Yus.png]]<br>[[Image:Cyrillic letter Iotified Big Yus.png]]
}}
'''Little Yus''' {{Unicode |(Ѧ, ѧ)}} and '''Big Yus''' {{Unicode |(Ѫ, ѫ)}}, or '''Jus''', are the [[letter]]s representing two [[Proto-Slavic language|Common Slavonic]] [[nasal vowel]]s, in the [[early Cyrillic alphabet|early Cyrillic]] and [[Glagolitic]] alphabets. Each can occur in [[iotified]] form {{Unicode |(Ѩ, ѩ, Ѭ, ѭ)}}, as a ligature with the letter [[Ukrainian I|I]].
[[Image:Yus.svg|frame|left|Cyrillic Little Yus (left) and Big Yus (right); normal forms (above) and iotified (below)]]
Phonetically, Little Yus represents a nasalized front vowel, possibly {{IPA2|ɛ̃}}, while Big Yus represents a nasalized back vowel, such as IPA {{IPA|[ɔ̃]}}.
Names of the letters do not imply [[capitalization]]: both Little and Big Yus exist in [[majuscule]] and [[Lower case|minuscule]] variants.
All modern Slavic languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet have lost the nasal vowels, making Yus unnecessary.
Big Yus was a part of the [[Bulgarian language|Bulgarian]] alphabet until 1945. However, the back nasal had disappeared from the language by that point. As a result, there were inconsistencies in its usage since people had to rely on memorized orthographic conventions to put it in its etymologically correct place. There are some Bulgarian or Macedonian dialects around [[Thessaloniki]] and [[Kastoria]] in Northern Greece which still keep nasal pronunciation: КъНде греНдеш, мило чеНдо?
In [[Russia]], Little Yus was adapted to represent the iotated /ja/ '''я''' in the middle or end of a word; the modern letter [[Ya (Cyrillic)|Ya]] '''я''' is an adaptation of its cursive form of the seventeenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708. (This is also why я in Russian often appears as ę in Polish; cf. Russian пять; Polish ''pięć''.)
In [[Polish language|Polish]], which is a Slavic language but uses the [[Latin alphabet]], the letter Ę, ę has the phonetic value of Little Yus, while Ą, ą has that of Big Yus. The ioticized forms, meanwhile, are written ię, ią in Polish. Curiously, the phonemes written ę and ą are not historically descended from those represented by Little and Big Yus, but developed after the original nasals merged in Polish.
Little and big Yus are also used in the [[Romanian Cyrillic alphabet]], used until about 1860.
==See also==
*[[Yat]]
[[Category:Cyrillic letters]]
[[Category:Cyrillic ligatures]]
{{writingsystem-stub}}
[[br:Ѫ (lizherenn)]]
[[bg:Голям юс]]
[[de:Slawische Nasalvokale]]
[[it:Jus]]
[[mk:Јус]]
[[ja:ユス]]
[[pt:Yus]]
[[ru:Юсы]]
[[fi:Ѭ]]
[[sv:Jus]]
[[uk:Юси]]
[[zh:Yus]]