Izhitsa Ѵ

Izhitsa stands forty third and last in the Early Cyrillic alphabet. It is Greek upsilon, and it is read as i or as v according to the letters around it, following the Byzantine pronunciation of the Greek digraphs.

Its name is unique in the set. It is a diminutive formed on the name of another letter, izhe, so it means something like the little i, and it is the only Slavonic letter name built out of a Slavonic letter name rather than out of a word of the language or a Greek original.

Its numeral value is 400 in the printed Church Slavonic tables, which follow the Greek series exactly. The manuscript tradition gives that value to uk instead, and the two usages cannot be reconciled; a reader working with a number in the four hundreds needs to know which tradition the book follows.

Like ksi, psi and fita it exists for Greek spelling and for the numeral series, and it writes nothing Slavonic requires. Its use narrowed steadily over the centuries to a handful of Greek derived words in the church books, and its final decline is the subject of the companion article.

It is worth noting simply as a matter of order that the Slavonic alphabet ends on a Greek letter, as it begins on a Greek shape carrying a Slavonic name.

Izhitsa outlasted its own usefulness by a long margin, and the way it finally went is different from the way the other letters went.

Yat, fita and the decimal i were abolished. They were named in the reform documents, argued over in public, defended by people who cared about them, and removed by decree. Izhitsa was not abolished in that sense. By the time the Russian reform arrived its use had contracted to so few words that it was already effectively out of the alphabet, and the reform decrees name the other letters rather than this one. It is generally described as having lapsed rather than as having been removed.

The words that kept it longest were church vocabulary, chief among them the term for the consecrated oil used in anointing, a Greek word in which the letter had always been written and in which it went on being written after it had disappeared from everything else. A letter can survive a long time inside a single word, particularly a word that is used constantly in one setting and almost never outside it.

That pattern is worth naming because it is the general fate of a letter in a living orthography. Letters do not vanish evenly. They retreat into the vocabulary that is most conservative, which is usually religious, legal or onomastic, and they are last seen in the words that people are least willing to respell.

Izhitsa is still set in the church books today, still read, and still carrying the number 400.