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Yer Ъ

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

Yer is the twenty-ninth letter of Cyrillic and writes the back jer, one of the two extremely short reduced vowels that Old Church Slavonic had. The later Slavic languages either lost the jers or turned them into full vowels, and the way a scribe writes or omits them is one of the most useful tools a Slavist has for dating and localising a manuscript, because a copyist writes according to his own speech. In Russian the letter survives as the hard sign, where it writes no vowel at all and marks the pronunciation of the consonant before it, and the 1918 reform cut its use back sharply. Bulgarian keeps the letter in its modern alphabet with a vowel value of its own, so the same sign is a vowel in one modern Slavic language and a silent mark in another.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yer's own description discusses the back jer sound and its use for dating manuscripts, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yer's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion.
Attributions
Associated Sound
A short back vowel, the reduced vowel scholars call the back jer 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-ninth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The treatment of the two jers in a manuscript is a principal criterion for dating and localising Church Slavonic copies 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic
Learn More
Yer: The Back Jer

Yer stands twenty ninth and writes the back jer, one of the two reduced vowels of Old Church Slavonic. It carries no numeral value.

A reduced vowel was a real vowel, short and weak, and in the earliest texts it is written wherever it was spoken, which is very often: Slavonic words could not end in a consonant, so almost every word ending in what a modern speaker hears as a consonant carried one of these letters at the end.

Two facts about the jers are worth holding together. They were pronounced, at least at the beginning, and the manuscripts are consistent enough about writing them to show it. And they were also doing a second job, telling a reader about the consonant before them: a back jer implied an unsoftened consonant and a front jer a softened one.

The first of those functions disappeared. The second did not, and it is the whole reason the letter survives in the modern alphabets as the hard sign, a letter with no sound of its own whose only work is to say something about its neighbour.

The sound change that produced that outcome is the most studied event in Slavic historical phonology, and it is set out in the companion article. Its consequences reach into every Slavic language spoken today.

The Fall of the Jers

At some point in the early medieval period the reduced vowels stopped being pronounced, but not all of them, and which ones fell was determined by position rather than by anything about the individual word.

The rule, worked out in the nineteenth century and named after the scholar who formulated it, counts jers backwards from the end of a word. A jer in a syllable followed by another jer is strong and survives, changing into a full vowel. A jer not so followed is weak and falls silent. Since the counting alternates, the result in a word with several jers is that they fall and survive in alternate syllables.

The consequences reshaped the languages. Words could now end in consonants, which they never had before. Consonant clusters appeared that had previously always been separated by a vowel. And a very large number of words acquired a vowel that appears in some grammatical forms and vanishes in others, depending on what followed, which is why Slavic grammars all have a section on fugitive vowels.

The orthography lagged behind by centuries. Scribes went on writing jers where they were no longer spoken, because that was how the words were spelled, and Russian was still writing a hard sign at the end of every consonant final word until 1918. Removing it saved a noticeable proportion of the paper in a printed book, which was one of the arguments actually made for the reform.

The jers therefore illustrate the whole relationship between sound and spelling in this tradition: the sound goes, the letter stays, and the letter finds a new job.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Yeru Ⱏ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Yer, the back jer, writes a reduced vowel Greek had no sign for, and paleographers generally trace the Cyrillic sign to the Glagolitic yeru. Because the reduced vowels lost their distinct sound in most Slavic languages early and their letters were reused or simplified over time, some Slavists hold the surviving Cyrillic shape reflects later scribal simplification more than a faithful copy of the original Glagolitic letter, which weakens a strict derivation claim.

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

Derived from This

Yery Ы, Alphabet Letters

Yery is written as a compound whose first element is the back jer. Glagolitic writes the same vowel as a compound too, so the correspondence between the two scripts runs between compounds rather than between single letters.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Yer 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

Yeri Ь, Alphabet Letters

Yer and yeri are the two jers, the reduced back and front vowels of Old Church Slavonic. Their collapse is the best studied sound change in the Slavic languages.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Yeru Ⱏ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Yer writes the same sound and stands in the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter. 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.)
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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