Yat

Yat or Jat (Old Church Slavonic ть or ıать, Russian ять, Serbian јат) is the name of the 32nd letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet and of the sound represented by it. The 33rd letter in the Glagolitic alphabet is used for the same sound and also bears the name Jat (this same glagolitic letter also corresponded to Cyrillic A iotated (ıа)). In the modern Latin alphabet (Czech language and scientific transcription for old Slavic languages) the sound is denoted as "e with caron": ě.

Yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel. Today it is not certain how it was pronounced: according to some modern reconstructions, it may have been [ae:] or dipthongal [ie:]. It is significant that from the earliest texts, there is considerable confusion between the yat and the iotated a (Cyrillic ıа).

Whichever the sound was, it gradually vanished from the Slavic languages, which meant that, while learning to write, children had to memorise mechanically where to write yat and where not. Thus, the letter was dropped in various orthography reforms: in Serbian with the reform of Vuk Karadzic, which was later used for Macedonian, in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian roughly with the October revolution, and in Bulgarian as late as 1945. The letter is no longer used in the standard modern orthography of any of the Slavic languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet, although it survives in liturgical and church texts written in the Russian recension of Church Slavonic, and has since 1991 found some favour in advertising.

In various modern Slavic languages Yat has reflected into various vowels. For example, the old Slavic root běl (white) became /b'el/ in standard Russian (dialectal /b'al/, /b'ijel/ or even /b'il/ in some regions), /bil/ in Ukrainian and biel/biały in Polish.

Yat in Russia and Ukraine

In the Russian language, confusion between the yat and e in writing occurs from the earliest records, but when exactly the final disappearance of the original sound from all dialects took place is a topic of scientific debate. Some scholars, for example W.K. Matthews, have placed the coalescence of the two sounds at the earliest historical phases (eleventh century or earlier), attributing its use until 1918 to Church Slavonic influence. Within Russia itself, however, a consensus has found its way into university textbooks of historical grammar (e.g., V.V. Ivanov), that, taking all the dialects into account, the sounds remained predominatly distinct until the eighteenth century, and are distinct to this day in some localities. It may be noteworthy in this respect that the yat in Ukrainian usually merged in sound with i, and therefore has remained distinct from e.

The story of the letter yat and its elimination from the Russian alphabet makes for an interesting footnote in Russian cultural history; see Reforms of Russian orthography.

Code positions

Yat is present in Unicode, though it is often absent from commonly available fonts. If your font does include it, you should see the capital and small yats here: Ѣѣ.

Character encoding Case Binary Hexadecimal Octal Decimal

Unicode Capital 0000010001100010 0462 2142 1122

Small 0000010001100011 0463 2143 1123

Its HTML Entities are Ѣ or Ѣ for the capital and ѣ or ѣ for the small letter.

Yat

Yat in Russia and Ukraine

Code positions

See also