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Yeru Ⱏ

Glagolitic Letters

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Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius

Yeru is the thirty-first letter of Glagolitic and writes the back jer, one of two extremely short reduced vowels that Old Church Slavonic had and that the later Slavic languages either lost or turned into full vowels. Its presence in a manuscript is one of the most useful dating tools a Slavist has, because the way a scribe writes or omits the jers reveals how far the loss had gone in the copyist's own speech. In Cyrillic this letter survives in Russian as the hard sign, where it no longer writes a vowel at all but marks the pronunciation of the consonant before it. It carries no numeral value in either Slavic script, and both scripts write it with a compound rather than a simple sign.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yeru'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 on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Yeru's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Attributions
Associated Sound
A short back vowel, the reduced vowel scholars write as a back jer 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2
Place of Origin
Byzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1
Position
The thirty-second letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old 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 Old Church Slavonic copies, because scribes wrote them according to their own speech 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Learn More
Yeru: The Glagolitic Letter

Yeru writes one of the reduced vowels of Old Church Slavonic, the back member of the pair conventionally called the jers, and it carries no numeral value.

The jers are the most consequential letters in the Slavonic alphabet for anyone tracing the history of the Slavic languages. They wrote extremely short vowels which behaved differently according to their position in a word: in some positions they disappeared entirely, and in others they lowered and lengthened into ordinary full vowels. That change, which the literature calls the fall of the jers, reshaped the sound system of every Slavic language, produced the consonant clusters those languages are known for, and happened at different times in different regions.

Because of that, the way a manuscript writes the jers is one of the most sensitive indicators of its date and origin that a philologist has. A text that writes them consistently in the older positions is following an older norm. A text that omits them where they had gone silent, or confuses the two, is recording a language in which the change had already run.

The name is opaque, in this script and in Cyrillic, and no etymology has been established for it.

The letter carries no numeral, standing well past the end of the Glagolitic counted series, and the same is true of its Cyrillic counterpart, since Greek had nothing resembling these vowels and could supply neither a sign nor a number for them. They are among the most purely Slavic parts of the alphabet, invented for a language whose sound system had no Mediterranean parallel.

Yeru and the Fall of the Jers

The reduced vowels are where an early Slavonic manuscript stops being a text and becomes evidence. Because they vanished in some positions and became full vowels in others, and because that process worked through the Slavic world unevenly over a long period, any scribe copying an older book had to decide what to do with letters that no longer answered to anything he said.

Three habits are visible in the manuscripts and each tells a different story. A scribe may copy them faithfully wherever his exemplar has them, which preserves the older orthography and tells you about his training rather than his speech. He may drop them where they had gone silent, which tells you the change had run in his own language. Or he may write them in the wrong places, which tells you they had become a spelling convention with no sound behind them at all, learned as a rule and applied imperfectly.

Sorting a corpus by those habits is one of the standard methods of Slavic philology, and it is how texts with no date and no colophon are placed. It works because the letters were written long after they had stopped being pronounced, which is a general truth about alphabets: a script preserves the language of the moment it was fixed, and everything after that is a negotiation between the writing and the speech.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived from This

Yer Ъ, 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

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Yeru belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.

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

Related To

Cyril of Thessalonica, Historical Figures
Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik
Yer Ъ, 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
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque Glagolitic letter names, fritu, heru, tsi and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

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 the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close 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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