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Concept
Yat
Summary
Yat or jat (Ѣ ѣ; italics: Ѣ ѣ) is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet and the Rusyn alphabet.
There is also another version of yat, the iotated yat (majuscule: , minuscule: ), which is a Cyrillic character combining a decimal I and a yat. There was no numerical value for this letter and it was not in the Glagolitic alphabet. It was encoded in Unicode 5.1 at positions U+A652 and U+A653.
Yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel. It is generally believed to have represented the sound [æ] or [ɛ], which was a reflex of earlier Proto-Slavic */ē/ and */aj/. That the sound represented by yat developed late in the history of Common Slavic is indicated by its role in the Slavic second palatalization of the Slavic velar consonants.
Significantly, from the earliest texts, there was considerable confusion between the yat and the Cyrillic Iotated A . One explanation is that the dialect of Thessaloniki (on which the Old Church Slavonic literary language was based), and other South Slavic dialects shifted from /ę/ to /ja/ independently from the Northern and Western branches. The confusion was also possibly aggravated by Cyrillic Little Yus looking very similar to the older Glagolitic alphabet's yat . An extremely rare "iotated yat" form also exists, documented only in Svyatoslav's Izbornik from 1073.
In various modern Slavic languages, yat has reflected into various vowels. For example, the old Slavic root bělъ | бѣлъ (white) became:
бел /bjel/ in Standard Russian (dialectal /bjal/, /bjijel/ or even /bjil/ in some regions)
біл /bjil/ in Ukrainian and Rusyn
бел /bjel/ in Belarusian
бял /bjal// бели /beli/ in Bulgarian (бел /bel// бели in Western dialects)
бел /bel/ in Macedonian
beo / beli in the standard Serbian Ekavian variant of Serbo-Croatian (genitive bela / belog(a))
bil / bili in Ikavian Serbo-Croatian
bijel / bijeli in the standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian Ijekavian variants of Serbo-Croatian (genitive bijela / bijelog(a))
bel / beli in Slovenian
biel / biały in Polish
běl / bílý in Czech
biel / biely in Slovak.
Official source
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