Ya (Cyrillic)
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Ya (Я, я) is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, representing either the combination /ja/ (a so-called iotated vowel) or /a/ after a palatalized consonant.
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[edit] History
Я is actually a hybrid of two historic letters. One is iotified a (Ꙗ, ꙗ) a ligature of Decimal I and A, similar to letters like Yu (Ю) or Iotified E (Ѥ). The other is Little Yus (Ѧ) and the Iotified Yat. In East Slavic (including Russian), the phonetic distinction between IA ([ja]) and Ѧ (a front nasal vowel /ɛ̃/ in Old Church Slavonic) was lost, so that in many East Slavic texts written in the Cyrillic cursive script (Skoropis), a variant of the letter Ѧ without the middle leg (Ꙙ, ꙙ) was used to indicate [ja].
When Peter I introduced his "civil script" in 1708, he had this round form of Ѧ adapted to the roman style of the Western European Latin alphabet, which resulted in the form of a backwards Latin R.
Consequently, this new "Я" has no counterpart in the Glagolitic, Greek or Latin alphabets, no numerical value, and no name other than "Ya".
[edit] Code positions
Я is encoded as follows:
| Character encoding | Case | Binary | Hexadecimal | Octal | Decimal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | Capital | 0000010000101111 | 042F | 2057 | 1071 |
| Small | 0000010001001111 | 044F | 2117 | 1103 | |
| KOI | Capital | 11110001 | F1 | 361 | 241 |
| Small | 11010001 | D1 | 321 | 209 | |
| Windows 1251 | Capital | 11011111 | DF | 337 | 223 |
| Small | 11111111 | FF | 377 | 255 | |
| ISO 8859-5 | Capital | 11001111 | CF | 317 | 207 |
| Small | 11101111 | EF | 357 | 239 |
Its HTML entity is Я or Я for capital and я or я for small letter.
In versions of Unicode up to and including 5.0, А iotified shared codepoints with Я, the actual glyph being dependent upon the font. However, with effect from version 5.1, Unicode provides the following dedicated codepoints for А iotified: hexadecimal A656 (capital), A657 (small).
[edit] Puns based on this letter
Я is the thirty-third and last letter of the Russian alphabet. In Russian, the word ya (я) is the personal pronoun 'I'. A popular saying based on this fact, "Ya (= I) is the last letter in the alphabet", is used to teach children modesty and humility. In Early Cyrillic alphabet the name az (азъ) of the first letter а stood for 'I'. In the Bulgarian language az (аз) means 'I', and ya is used in sentences to express surprise. In some Bulgarian dialects я is used instead of az (аз) but this is considered provincial or rural.
The Cyrillic letters Я and И are used in faux Cyrillic typography.
[edit] See also
