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Cyrillic letter Yery
Phonetic usage:	[?]
The Cyrillic script
Slavic letters
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Non-Slavic letters
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Archaic letters
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
List of Cyrillic letters Cyrillic digraphs
v t e

Yery, Yeru, Ery or Eru (? ?; italics: ? ?), usually called ? [?] in modern Russian or yerý historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the phoneme /?/ (more rear or upper than i) after non-palatalised (hard) consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets.

The letter is usually romanised into English and most other West European languages as ⟨y⟩: Krylov (family name, ). However, Latin ⟨y⟩ may be used for other purposes as well (such as for ⟨?⟩, or as part of digraphs, e.g. ⟨?⟩). That spelling matches Polish, which uses ⟨y⟩ to represent a very similar sound. Russian ⟨?⟩ is used to transliterate Polish ⟨y⟩ into Cyrillic: Maryla ().

Origin

The letter Yery in several fonts

Like many other Cyrillic letters, it was originally from a ligature ? (which is represented in Unicode as Yeru with Back Yer), formed from Yer ⟨?⟩ and ⟨?⟩ (formerly written either dotless or with two dots) or Izhe (⟨?⟩ which formerly resembled ⟨?⟩). In mediaeval manuscripts, it is almost always found as ⟨⟩ or ⟨⟩. Once the letters ⟨?⟩ and ⟨?⟩ later lost their values as vowels in the Slavic languages, the current simplified form ⟨?⟩ evolved.^{[clarification needed]}

Usage

The soft sign (?) has the same trill. Because of phonological processes, the actual realisation of /i/ after alveolar consonants (⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, or ⟨?⟩) is retracted to a close central unrounded vowel [?] or [], after labials: ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩.

In Rusyn, it denotes a sound a bit harder^{[clarification needed]} than [?] and close to the Romanian sound î, also written â. In some situations, it may occur after palatalised consonants ( "blue", which never happens in Russian), and it often follows ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩, ⟨?⟩ and ⟨?⟩.

While vowel letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may be divided into iotated and non-iotated pairs (for example, ⟨?⟩ and ⟨?⟩ both represent /a/, the latter denoting a preceding palatalised consonant), ⟨?⟩ is more complicated. It appears only after hard consonants, its phonetic value differs from ⟨?⟩, and there is some scholarly disagreement as to whether or not ⟨?⟩ and ⟨?⟩ denote different phonemes.^[]

Native Russian words do not begin with ⟨?⟩ (except for the specific verb : "to say the ⟨?⟩-sound"), but there are many proper and common nouns of non-Russian origin (including some geographical names in Russia) beginning with it: Kim Jong-un ( ) and Eulji Mundeok ( ), a Korean military leader; and Ytyk-Kyuyol (?-), Ygyatta (?), a village and a river in Sakha (Yakutia) Republic respectively.

In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery is not used as the language lacks the sound /?/.^[1] In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery was mixed with [i] and was phased out in the second half of the 19th century.^[2] According to Ukrainian academician Hryhoriy Pivtorak, the letter was replaced with so called "Cyrillic i" ⟨?⟩ which in Ukrainian language pronounced as and appeared due to the merger of letters ⟨?⟩ and ⟨i⟩ ("Cyrillic dotted i").^[1] The yery letter could be found in several earlier versions of Ukrainian writing system that were introduced in the 19th century among which are "Pavlovsky writing system", "Slobda Ukraine (New) writing system", "Yaryzhka", and others.^[3]

The letter ⟨?⟩ is also used in Cyrillic-based alphabets of several Turkic and Mongolic languages (see the list) for a darker vowel . The corresponding letter in Latin-based scripts are ⟨?⟩ (dotless I), I with bowl, and the soft sign (? ?)

In Tuvan, the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.^[4][5]

Related letters and other similar characters

• ? ? : Cyrillic letter Soft sign
• ? ? : Cyrillic letter I
• ? ? : Cyrillic letter Yer
• I ? : Latin letter Dotless I
• ? ? : Latin letter U with horn, the 26th letter of the Vietnamese alphabet.

Computing codes

References

• Russian: An interactive online reference grammar, by Dr Robert Beard

External links

• The dictionary definition of ? at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of ? at Wiktionary