Izhitsa

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Heading=Cyrillic letter Izhitsa

Izhitsa (unicode|Ѵ, ѵ; _ru. И́жица) is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. It was used to represent upsilon (Υ, υ) in words derived from Greek, such as сunicode|ѵнодъ (sünodǔ, 'synod'). However, because it made the same sound /i/ as the normal letter и, it was considered superfluous. It was based on the Glagolitic Izhitsa (Slavonic|Ⱛ, ⱛ).

In the Russian language, the usage of izhitsa became more and more rare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was only one word with relatively stable spelling with izhitsa: мunicode|ѵро (müro, 'myrrh') and its derivatives. The orthographic reform of 1918 does not mention the letter at all, so it “died” with no formal act. The capital form of izhitsa has traditionally been used in Russian books instead of the Roman numeral V.

The traditional spelling of Serbian was more conservative. It preserved all etymologically motivated izhitsas in words of Greek origin. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić had reformed the Serbian alphabet in the beginning of the nineteenth century and eliminated the letter, but the old spelling was used in some places as late as the 1880s.

Izhitsa is still in use in the Church Slavonic language. Like modern Greek upsilon, it can be pronounced /i/ as и, or /v/ as в. The basic distinction rule is simple: izhitsa with stress and/or aspiration marks is a vowel and therefore pronounced /i/; izhitsa without diacritical marks is a consonant and pronounced /v/. Unstressed /i/-sounding izhitsas are marked with a special diacritical mark, the so-called "kendema" or "kendima" (from the Greek word κέντημα). The shape of "kendema" over izhitsa may vary: in the books of Russian origin, it typically looks like double grave or sometimes like double acute. In older Serbian books, "kendema" most often looked like two dots (diaeresis) or might even be replaced by a surrogate combination of aspiration and acute. These shape distinctions (with the exception of aspiration+acute) have no orthographical meaning and must be considered just as font style variations, so the Unicode name “izhitsa with double grave” (majuscule: unicode|Ѷ, minuscule: unicode|ѷ) is slightly misleading. Izhitsa with "kendema" is not a separate letter of the alphabet, but it may have personal position in computer encodings (e.g., Unicode). Historically, izhitsa with "kendema" corresponds to the Greek upsilon with "dialytika" (Ϋ, ϋ), but the orthographical meaning is quite different: Greeks use "dialytika" to prevent building diphthongs out of adjacent vowels, whereas Slavonic izhitsas with "kendema" may occur anywhere, even with no other vowels nearby.

The izhitsa is also used in the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, used until about 1860.

Due to its similarity to the new IPA symbol for the labiodental flap, the izhitsa is sometimes used in its place.

Code positions

Izhitsa is supported by Unicode.

Its HTML entities are Ѵ or Ѵ for the capital and ѵ or ѵ for the small letter.

References

* [http://www.uni-giessen.de/partosch/eurotex99/berdnikov2.pdf A Berdnikov and O Lapko, "Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode", EuroTEX ’99 Proceedings] , September 1999 (PDF)