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Ya (Я, я) is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, representing the iotated vowel (IPA).
History Ya is actually a hybrid of two historic letters. One is a iotified (IA), a ligature of decimal I and A, similar to letters like Yu (Ю) or Iotified E (). The other is Little Yus (). In East Slavic (including Russian), the phonetic distinction between IA (ja) and (a front nasal vowel ) was lost, so that in many East Slavic texts written in the Cyrillic cursive script (Skoropis), a variant of the letter (a rounder form without the 'middle leg') was used to indicate ja. When Peter I introduced his "civil script" in 1708, he had this round form of 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". Code positions In Unicode, Я shares codepoints with IA (A iotified). The actual glyph depends on the font.
Its HTML entity is & 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 of the first letter а stood for 'I'. In the Bulgarian language az means 'I', and ya is used in sentences to express surprise. The Cyrillic letters Я and И are used in faux Cyrillic typography. See also | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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