Initial Izhe Ⰺ

Initial izhe is a second form of the letter izhe, and the Unicode Standard gives it a code point of its own under that name. It is a positional variant: a shape used at the beginning of a word where the ordinary form is used elsewhere, on the same principle by which several scripts distinguish an initial from a medial letter without treating the two as different letters.

Variants of this kind are the reason the number of letters in Glagolitic is quoted differently by different authorities. A count that lists every distinct sign attested in the manuscripts arrives at a larger figure than a count that lists only the letters of the alphabet as the abecedaria recite them, and both counts are defensible because they are answering different questions. The recited alphabet has a fixed length; the repertoire a scribe actually used does not.

Being a variant, the sign carries no numeral value of its own. The count of the alphabet runs through the ordinary form of izhe at ten and passes over the variant entirely, which is consistent with the treatment of every other positional or regional form in the script.

Its presence in a text is a fact about the scribe rather than about the language. Nothing in Old Church Slavonic distinguishes an initial i from any other i, so the choice is one of hand and training.

The letter is a good place to state plainly what the atlas is doing when it lists forty four Glagolitic letters. That list follows the arrangement of the Unicode Standard, which encodes the signs attested across the tradition, including regional and positional forms that no single manuscript uses all of. It is a repertoire, not a reconstruction of the alphabet as Constantine made it.

The oldest Slavonic account of the alphabet, the treatise on the letters by the monk known as Chernorizets Hrabar, gives a figure of thirty eight, and that figure does not match the number of distinct signs in the surviving codices, nor do the codices match each other. No manuscript survives from the mission itself. The earliest Glagolitic books are a century or more later than the alphabet, they were made in a different country from the one the mission served, and they differ among themselves in which signs they carry and in what order an abecedary lists them.

So a variant such as initial izhe sits in a grey area by construction. It is a real form, used by real scribes, and whether it counts as a letter depends on what is being counted. Naming it and saying why it is uncertain is more useful than deciding the question by leaving it out.