Yat

Yat or Jat (Old Church Slavonic ѣть or ıать, Russian ять, Serbian јат) is the name of the 32nd letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet and of the sound represented by it. The 33rd letter in the Glagolitic alphabet   is used for the same sound and also bears the name Jat (this same glagolitic letter also corresponded to Cyrillic A iotated (ıа)). In the modern Latin alphabet (Czech language and scientific transcription for old Slavic languages) the sound is denoted as "e with caron": ě.

Yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel. Today it is not certain how it was pronounced: according to some modern reconstructions, it may have been [ae:] or dipthongal [ie:]. It is significant that from the earliest texts, there is considerable confusion between the yat and the iotated a (Cyrillic ıа).

Whichever the sound was, it gradually vanished from the Slavic languages, which meant that, while learning to write, children had to memorise mechanically where to write yat and where not. Thus, the letter was dropped in various orthography reforms: in Serbian with the reform of Vuk Karadzic, which was later used for Macedonian, in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian roughly with the October revolution, and in Bulgarian as late as 1945. The letter is no longer used in the standard modern orthography of any of the Slavic languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet, although it survives in liturgical and church texts written in the Russian recension of Church Slavonic, and has since 1991 found some favour in advertising.

In various modern Slavic languages Yat has reflected into various vowels. For example, old Slavic root "běl" (white) became "b'el" in standard Russian (dialectal "b'al" in some regions), "bil" in Ukrainian and "biel/biały" in Polish.

Yat in Russia

The story of the letter yat and its elimination from the Russian alphabet makes for an interesting footnote in Russian cultural history; see Reforms of Russian orthography.

Code positions

Yat is present in Unicode, though it is often absent from commonly available fonts. If your font does include it, you should see the capital and small yats here: Ѣѣ.

Its HTML Entities are Ѣ or Ѣ for the capital and ѣ or ѣ for the small letter.

See also

• Ou, Yus

(Russian letters bolded; old letters italics)