Alphabet Letters
Izhe И
Cyrillic Letters
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Origin Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire
Izhe is the tenth letter of Cyrillic and the first of its two signs for the vowel i. Its name is the Slavonic relative pronoun meaning who or which, and it carries the numeral 8, the value of Greek eta, whose sound had become i in Byzantine Greek. That is the same shift that gave vedi the value 2, and it is why the Cyrillic numerals look scattered when read against the Cyrillic alphabet: they are in Greek order, not Slavic order. The letter is the ancestor of the modern Russian and Bulgarian i, and the shape it now has is a later rotation of the Greek form. In Slavonic numeral notation a letter used as a figure is written under a titlo, the stroke that tells the reader to take the sign as a number rather than as a sound.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodDeveloped in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire 2 Place of OriginThe First Bulgarian Empire, in the school of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, with Preslav and Ohrid the two centres most often named 2 Origin of the NameA Slavonic word used as the letter name, shared by both Slavic alphabets 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Sense of the Nameizhe is a Slavonic relative pronoun meaning who or which 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceIzhe's numeral value 8 reflects the Greek eta, whose sound had itself become i in Byzantine Greek by the time the Slavic scripts were made, the same shift that also moved vedi to 2; a number used as a figure rather than a sound is marked in Slavonic notation with a titlo, the stroke that tells a reader to read it as a numeral. 1 Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: one letter to a sound, built on Greek uncial letterforms with additional signs, several of them taken from Glagolitic, for the Slavonic sounds Greek could not write 1 PositionThe tenth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Attributions
Associated SoundThe vowel i 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Learn More
Izhe: The Letter That Is Also a Relative Pronoun
Izhe stands tenth, writes the vowel i, and carries the numeral 8 from Greek eta. Its name is the Slavonic relative pronoun, the word for who or which, and it is one of the most frequent words in the liturgical texts the alphabet was built to carry.
The mismatch between its shape and its sound is a fossil of Greek. The letter is Greek eta, which in classical Greek wrote a long e, but Byzantine Greek had merged that vowel into i centuries before the mission to the Slavs, and it is the Byzantine value that Cyrillic took. The numeral came with the shape, so this letter carries 8 while standing tenth in the alphabet.
In the Russian tradition it acquired a name built on that number. It is called the octal i, to distinguish it from the following letter, called the decimal i, and the two are told apart in speech by their numeral values rather than by anything about their sound. It is a rare case of an alphabet naming its letters after arithmetic.
The letter survives in every modern Cyrillic alphabet as the ordinary sign for i, and its printed shape has been mirrored relative to the Greek eta it descends from, a change that took place gradually in the manuscript centuries and was fixed by the first printers.
Two Letters for One Vowel, and the Rules That Sorted Them
Slavonic had one vowel i and Cyrillic gave it two letters, izhe and i, inherited from the Greek eta and iota. Neither could be dropped, because both carried numerals the system needed, so the tradition did what it did with every such pair and fixed the distribution by rule.
The rules changed over time and differed between the manuscript tradition and the printed church books. In the settled printed orthography the decimal i is written before another vowel and in a small set of fixed words, and izhe is written everywhere else. A reader who knows the rule can use it: an i standing before a vowel is a signal about the shape of the word that follows.
The best known application of the distinction is a pair of Russian words that were spelled alike except for which i they used, one meaning peace and the other meaning world. The pair was abolished with the letter itself in 1918, and a well known story holds that the title of a famous novel turns on it. The printed editions do not support the story, which is a useful reminder that a good anecdote about orthography outlives the orthography.
The general point stands: a distinction that no longer marks any difference in speech does not become useless. It becomes a carrier of information about etymology, about vocabulary and, in the hands of the people arguing about spelling reform, about who was educated and who was not.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Izhe takes its shape from Greek eta and its numeral value of 8 from the same letter, but writes i rather than a long e, because Byzantine Greek had already merged eta into i.
Originates in Language
Izhe is a letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which was assembled to write Old Church Slavonic and which takes its letter names from that language.
Related To
Izhe and the decimal i are the two Cyrillic signs for the vowel i, told apart in the Russian tradition by their numeral values, 8 and 10, rather than by anything about their sound.
Cyrillic izhe answers to Glagolitic izhe: the same name and the same vowel i. The numeral values differ, 8 against 10, because Cyrillic follows the Greek allocation and Glagolitic numbers its own letters in order.
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