Omega Ѡ

Omega stands twenty fourth, writes the vowel o, and carries the numeral 800. It is Greek omega, taken over whole, and it is one of the letters that exist in Cyrillic because Greek had them rather than because Slavonic needed them.

Slavonic has one o. Cyrillic gave it two letters, on and omega, and no rule of pronunciation could ever distinguish them. What developed instead was a distribution by convention, and the conventions grew more elaborate rather than less. In the printed church books omega is written at the beginning of certain words, in certain prepositions and interjections, and in a small set of fixed forms, and the printers added further variants: a broad form, and a decorated form used in exclamations.

Its numeral value of 800 is what made it indispensable. The hundreds series needs nine letters, and removing omega would have left the series short with nothing available to replace it, so the letter was protected by arithmetic for as long as the arithmetic was in use.

It was among the letters struck from secular printing when a civil type was introduced in the early eighteenth century, and it has no place in any modern Cyrillic alphabet. In the church books it is still set and still read, which is the pattern for most of the letters this alphabet has lost: withdrawn from ordinary use, retained in liturgy.

The Greek phrase naming the first and last letters of the alphabet as an image of beginning and end depends on a fact about Greek: alpha opens the alphabet and omega closes it. The figure is only as good as that arrangement.

Cyrillic does not have it. Azu opens the alphabet, and azu is not alpha; it is a Slavonic word meaning I, given the shape of alpha. And omega, having been imported with its Greek name and its Greek number, does not close the Slavonic alphabet at all. It sits twenty fourth of forty three, with nineteen letters after it, and the last letter of the Early Cyrillic set is izhitsa.

A translator therefore faces a choice with no good answer. Keep the Greek names and the figure survives but the letters named are not the letters of the book the reader is holding. Substitute the Slavonic names and the letters become familiar while the figure stops being true, because the second of them is not last.

This is a small instance of a problem that runs through the whole translating enterprise the alphabet was made for. A text that talks about its own language cannot be moved into another one without loss, and the places where that shows are the places where a translation reveals its seams. The Slavonic tradition met the difficulty repeatedly: in acrostics, in wordplay, in the names of things, and in every passage where the point turns on how a word is spelled rather than on what it means.