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Alphabet Letters

Tsy Ц

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

Tsy is the twenty-fifth letter of Cyrillic and writes the affricate ts. The sound is native to Slavonic and had no Greek letter, so the sign was taken from Glagolitic; but unlike the other Glagolitic borrowings it does carry a numeral, 900, because that slot in the Greek series had been left by an obsolete letter and was available. Its shape, a bowl with a descender on the right, is the basis of the letter for cherv as well, and the same descending stroke appears on shta, so a group of the Slavic-only letters share a visual feature that the Greek-derived letters do not. It remains in use in every modern Cyrillic alphabet with the same value it had in the ninth century, and its descender is one of the few visual marks that set the Slavic letters apart from the Greek ones on a page.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Tsy's own description discusses its shape and its numeral history, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Fert (736), this cohort's own already-live precedent, links the same class of gap to the already-live OpenQuestion, extended here to Tsy.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Tsy's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Attributions
Associated Sound
The affricate ts 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire 2
Place of Origin
The First Bulgarian Empire, in the school of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, with Preslav and Ohrid the two centres most often named 2
Identity
Script Type
An 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
Position
The twenty-fifth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Tsy is one of the few Slavic-only letters to carry a numeral at all, 900, because that slot in the Greek series had been left vacant by an obsolete letter; its shape, a bowl with a descender, is shared with cherv and with the descender on shta, marking a family visual feature the Greek-derived letters do not carry. 1
Learn More
Tsy: The Letter for Ts

Tsy stands twenty fifth, writes the affricate ts, and carries the numeral 900. Its name is not a word of the language but the sound of the letter with a vowel attached, which is the naming pattern used for most of the signs supplied for sounds Greek did not have.

The sound is thoroughly Slavic. It arose from an inherited k before certain front vowels, in one of the palatalisations that shaped the consonant system of every Slavic language, and its distribution in the grammar still reflects that origin: the alternation between k and ts runs through noun and verb paradigms across the family.

The letterform has no Greek model, and where it came from is argued. The majority reading takes it from the Glagolitic letter of the same sound. A comparison with the Hebrew tsadi has been made since the nineteenth century and is still current, and a third position holds that shapes this simple cannot support either claim. That question is recorded on the relation between this letter and its Glagolitic counterpart rather than settled here.

Its numeral value of 900 is anomalous and deliberately so, and it is set out in the companion article. The letter survives, unchanged in shape and in sound, in every modern Cyrillic alphabet.

The Numbers That Break the Alphabetical Order

Cyrillic numeration is Greek numeration, and Greek numeration has three gaps in it. The Greek alphabet has twenty four letters and the system needs twenty seven, nine each for units, tens and hundreds, so Greek pressed three obsolete signs into service to fill the slots at 6, at 90 and at 900. Those three signs were not letters of the working alphabet.

Cyrillic could not do that. It had no obsolete signs of its own, and the three slots still had to be filled, so it used letters it did have and put them where the numbers required rather than where the alphabet did. Dzelo takes 6, which is why the eighth letter carries the sixth number. Cherv takes 90, which is why the twenty sixth letter carries a number lower than the letter before it. And tsy takes 900, the highest value in the series, while standing twenty fifth.

The consequence is that from these letters onward the alphabetical order and the numeral order are not merely offset, they are out of sequence. Cherv, standing after tsy, carries 90 against tsy's 900. A reader who assumes the numbers rise with the alphabet will produce numbers that are wrong by an order of magnitude.

The arrangement is also evidence. Somebody deliberately fitted three Slavonic letters into three Greek numeral slots, choosing which letter went where. That is a designed act, not a drift, and it is one of the clearest signs that the alphabet was assembled by people who understood the Greek system thoroughly and meant to reproduce it exactly.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Tsi Ⱌ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Tsy writes ts, a sound Greek had no letter for, and Cyrillic paleographers broadly treat it as borrowed from the Glagolitic tsi. As with sha, the harder question is what stands behind the Glagolitic letter itself: a proposed link to the Hebrew tsade is argued by some Slavists and rejected by others who see no secure model beyond the Glagolitic alphabet's own internal design.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Tsy 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.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Related To

Tsi Ⱌ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Tsy writes the same sound and stands in the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Glagolitic leaves it unnumbered, its counted series having ended earlier in the order; Cyrillic numbers it 900 from the Greek series. Which of the two Slavonic scripts came first, and how much either owes the other, is argued rather than settled.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Tsi Ⱌ, Alphabet Letters

Tsy answers to Glagolitic Tsi: the same sound and the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Glagolitic leaves it unnumbered, its counted series having ended earlier in the order; Cyrillic numbers it 900 from a vacant Greek slot.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996on the Slavic alphabets, their letters and their numeral systemsView the Source
2. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius
Francis Dvornik, Rutgers University Press, 1970on the Moravian mission and the making of the Slavic lettersView the Source
The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Consortiumon the encoded characters, their names and their block assignmentView the Source
Old Church Slavonic Grammar
Horace G. Lunt, Mouton de Gruyter, 2001View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque letter names at the end of the Slavic alphabets, fert, kher, tsy and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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