Cyrillic Small Letter Yn

It was a Romanian spelling letter for forms now written în-, îm-, and initial î.

In older Romanian writing, ꙟ represented nasal material at the start of some words and could also cover initial î. Its sound had more than one realization, so the word and spelling period matter.

A documented printed example appears in the Romanian book Carte românească de învăţătură, published in Iaşi in 1646. After earlier overlap with big yus, ꙟ was restricted to word-initial use by 1683–1688.

A Romanian adaptation of big yus

Romanian writers adapted the Cyrillic alphabet, whose inventory drew heavily on Old Church Slavonic, to write a Romance language. Yn developed from big yus to represent a Romanian sound pattern; it was more than a change in the shape of that older letter.

The connection is historical: Romanian Cyrillic used ꙟ, while Church Slavonic writing did not include it in its letter inventory. Romanian Orthodox writing continued to use the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet until the 1860s; later Latin spelling used forms such as în, îm, and î.

Why can ꙟ look like an arrow?

That can be a font fallback, not the letter’s shape.

A font draws the character’s outline, so a font without the glyph may show ↑ or a missing-glyph box instead. A 2007 Unicode proposal noted limited font coverage and possible upward-arrow substitution. For Unicode-aware entry, use U+A65F in an editor that accepts code-point input, then select a font with historical Cyrillic coverage.