Alphabet Letters
Yestu Ⰵ
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
Yestu is the sixth letter of Glagolitic and writes the vowel e. Its name is the Slavonic verb form jestu, meaning is, the third person singular of the verb to be, and it closes the clause that the fourth and fifth letter names begin. It carries the numeral 6. In Cyrillic the corresponding letter also takes 5 rather than 6, because the Greek series gives 5 to epsilon, and the divergence here is the same one that runs through the whole of the two numeral systems. The vowel is a front e, distinguished in the orthography from the sound written by yati, which the same manuscripts keep as a separate letter.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodDevised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2 Place of OriginByzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2 Origin of the NameA Slavonic word used as the letter name, shared by both Slavic alphabets 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Sense of the Namejestu is the Slavonic third person singular of the verb to be, meaning is 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1 PositionThe sixth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attributions
Associated SoundThe vowel e 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceYestu writes a front e distinguished in the manuscripts from the separate letter for yat, and in Cyrillic the corresponding letter takes the Greek numeral 5 rather than Glagolitic's own 6, repeating the divergence that runs through both numeral systems. 1 Learn More
Yestu: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 6)
Yestu writes the vowel e and carries the numeral six. Its name is the third person singular of the verb to be, meaning it is, and it completes the second clause of the recited alphabet: glagoli dobro yestu, to speak is a good thing.
The vowel is a front mid vowel, and Old Church Slavonic distinguishes it from the separate letter yat, which writes a different front vowel whose exact quality varied by region. That distinction is one of the working tools of Slavic philology, because the two letters were confused in different ways in different places, and the pattern of confusion in a manuscript indicates where the scribe learned to write. A text that keeps them apart consistently is following a stricter norm than one that does not.
The letter also stands at the front of a large group of words in which a glide precedes the vowel. Glagolitic has a separate sign further down the order for the sequence with the glide, so the two are distinguished in careful writing, and the way a given manuscript handles the pair is another of the small habits by which its tradition can be identified.
The numeral six comes from counting the Glagolitic letters in their own sequence, which by this point in the order has already moved a full step away from the values Cyrillic assigns to the same names.
Yestu and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic yest writes the same vowel from the same place in the order and takes the numeral five, one behind the six that Glagolitic gives it. Both names come from the same Slavonic verb form, and both alphabets recite them in the same mnemonic sentence.
The letters diverge over the sounds around them rather than over the vowel itself. Cyrillic developed a separate sign for the sequence of glide plus e, written as a compound of two letters, and Glagolitic handled the same sequence with a sign of its own in a different part of the order. Neither system is more economical than the other; they are different solutions to the same problem, and comparing them across a pair of manuscripts that carry the same gospel text is one way of watching two scribal traditions handle one language.
The numeral divergence has a practical consequence for anyone reading an early Slavonic text. Where a manuscript in one script preserves the numbers of the other, the usual reading is that it was copied from an exemplar in the other script and the figures were carried across without conversion. Such crossings are part of the evidence in the argument over which alphabet came first, and they are read differently by the scholars who make Glagolitic the older script and by those who reverse the order.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Yestu is read as Greek Epsilon's counterpart in an alphabet Cyril modeled on Greek order and numeral values, but which theory explains where its rounded letterform actually came from is a live paleographic dispute. The mainstream palaeographic school, developed since Isaac Taylor's nineteenth century study, derives Glagolitic's ornamental shapes from medieval Greek cursive minuscule redesigned for Slavonic use. A rival idiographic school reads Glagolitic as substantially an original invention, its shapes built from basic forms such as the cross, circle and triangle rather than borrowed from any existing script, so this specific correspondence to Epsilon is accepted by one camp and denied by the other.
Originates in Language
Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Yestu belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic yest answers to Glagolitic yestu: the same name and the same vowel e.
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