Izhe Ⰹ

Izhe writes the vowel i and takes the numeral ten, the first of the tens in the Glagolitic count. It is the first of two signs in the alphabet for that vowel, and the existence of the pair is one of the features of the Slavonic alphabets that has never been given a fully satisfying explanation in terms of sound, since Old Church Slavonic appears to have had one i and not two.

The usual account is that the doubling follows Greek, where two letters had come to be read as i by the ninth century, and that the alphabet took over the pair along with the order it was built on. If so, the second sign is a piece of Greek inheritance carried into an alphabet that did not need it, which would be a useful piece of evidence about how the arrangement was made. Manuscripts distribute the two signs by scribal convention rather than by sound, and different traditions settled on different conventions, so the choice between them in a given text says more about where it was written than about how it was read.

The name izhe is a Slavonic relative pronoun, who or which. As a numeral the letter is the figure ten, and its position at the head of the tens is a consequence of the Glagolitic system counting its own letters straight through from the first.

Cyrillic izhe writes the same vowel and takes the numeral eight, against the ten that Glagolitic gives it. Eight is the Greek value of eta, the letter that had come to be read as i in the Greek of the period, and it shows the Cyrillic arithmetic doing what it does everywhere: inheriting a number from the Greek letter that stands in the slot, whatever the Slavic sound in that slot turns out to be.

Both alphabets carry two signs for the vowel i, and both distribute them by rule of thumb rather than by sound. The rules differ. Some traditions use one form at the start of a word and the other elsewhere, some alternate them before certain vowels, and some use them to avoid two identical shapes falling side by side. Editors of early Slavonic texts record the distribution rather than normalising it, because it is one of the few features that can group manuscripts into families.

The pair also matters to the argument between the two scripts. An alphabet that inherits a redundant distinction from Greek is being built on Greek in a fairly direct way, and both Slavonic scripts show that inheritance, which is a point in common between them that neither explanation of their relationship has to argue away.