Combining Cyrillic Letter Iotified A

It marks a letter above a shortened word. In Church Slavonic, a letter-titlo is a small letter written over a contracted word to show an element kept in its shortened spelling. ⷼ supplies the iotified-A element, a historical Cyrillic letter with a sound like “ya”. Read the whole word to understand the abbreviation.

ⷼ is a combining character, so it attaches to the character before it. On its own, it does not spell a word.

Where did iotified A come from?

The full letter grew from Cyrillic I and A. It appears in early Cyrillic manuscripts, including the Codex Suprasliensis, copied at the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century. The combining form belongs to the later practice of placing letters above contracted words.

Its reading and use differed among Cyrillic traditions. Some early traditions with Glagolitic antecedents used yat for both /ě/ and /ja/ into the fourteenth century. Iotified A remained in Serbian until Vuk Karadžić’s reforms and in Bulgarian into the late nineteenth century; Russian civil type instead followed a route through Little Yus to modern я.

Is ⷼ the same as modern я?

No; the similar sound does not make them interchangeable. The full letters Ꙗ and ꙗ are the uppercase and lowercase iotified A. ⷼ is their combining letter-titlo form; Ѧ/ѧ is Little Yus, a different historical letter associated with the history of modern я. Keep these distinctions in a faithful transcription.

Another titlo letter can share the space above one base. A font may place the letters side by side, join them, or stack them. Manuscript forms and Unicode chart forms can also differ because the chart follows a different Cyrillic letter model.