Tag: Yat

Yat or Jat (Ѣ ѣ; italics: Ѣ ѣ) is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet. Its name in Old Church Slavonic is jěd’ (ѣдь) or iad’ (ꙗдь). In the common scientific Latin transliteration for old Slavic languages, the letter is represented by e with caron: ě (taken from the Czech alphabet).
The yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel. It is generally believed to have represented the sound [æː], which was a reflex of earlier [eː], [oj], or [aj]. That the sound represented by yat developed late in the history of Common Slavic is indicated by its role in the second palatalization of the Slavic velar consonants. Significantly, from the earliest texts, there was considerable confusion between the yat and the Cyrillic iotified a (ꙗ). One explanation is that the dialect of Thessaloniki (on which the Old Church Slavic literary language was based) and other South Slavic dialects shifted from /æː/ to /ja/ independently from the Northern and Western branches. The confusion was also…