Yat or Jat (, ѣ) is the 32nd letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet and name of the sound represented by it. Its name in Old Church Slavonic is ѣть (yět') or ıать (yat'), in Bulgarian ят (yat), in Russian and Ukrainian ять (yat'), in Serbian јат (yat, Croatian spelling jat). In the modern Latin alphabet (Czech language and the common scientific transliteration for old Slavic languages) the letter is represented by "e with caron": ě.

The yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel. Today it is not certain how it was pronounced: according to some modern reconstructions, it may have been /æ:/ or dipthongal /ie:/. It is significant that from the earliest texts, there is considerable confusion between the yat and the iotified a (Cyrillic ıа). The confusion was possibly aggravated by the fact that in the Glagolitic alphabet yat ( ) looks very similar to Cyrillic Little Yus (Ѧ).

Cyrillic letter yat, set in several fonts. Note that in cursive small yat has quite different shape.

Whatever the sound was, it gradually vanished from the Slavic languages, which meant that, while learning to write, children had to memorise mechanically where to write yat and where not. Therefore, the letter was dropped in a series of orthographic reforms: in Serbian with the reform of Vuk Karadžić, which was later adopted for Macedonian, in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian roughly with the October revolution, and in Bulgarian as late as 1945. The letter is no longer used in the standard modern orthography of any of the Slavic languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet, although it survives in liturgical and church texts written in the Russian recension of Church Slavonic, and has since 1991 found some favour in advertising.

In various modern Slavic languages the yat has reflected into various vowels. For example, the old Slavic root [běl] (white) became [bel] /bʲel/ in standard Russian (dialectal /bʲal/, /bʲijel/ or even /bʲil/ in some regions), [bil] in Ukrainian, [bjal] in Bulgarian, biel/biały in Polish, and bílý in Czech. Older, unrelated reflexes of yat exist; for example, old word тѣлѣгы (carts) became modern Russian телеги but in Serbian it's таљиге.

Yat in Russia and Ukraine

In the Russian language, confusion between the yat and e in writing occurs from the earliest records, but when exactly the final disappearance of the original sound from all dialects took place is a topic of scientific debate. Some scholars, for example W.K. Matthews, have placed the coalescence of the two sounds at the earliest historical phases (eleventh century or earlier), attributing its use until 1918 to Church Slavonic influence. Within Russia itself, however, a consensus has found its way into university textbooks of historical grammar (e.g., V.V. Ivanov), that, taking all the dialects into account, the sounds remained predominatly distinct until the eighteenth century, at least under stress, and are distinct to this day in some localities. It may be noteworthy in this respect that the yat in Ukrainian usually merged in sound with i, and therefore has remained distinct from e.

The story of the letter yat and its elimination from the Russian alphabet makes for an interesting footnote in Russian cultural history; see Reforms of Russian orthography. A full list of words that were written with the letter yat at the beginning of twentieth century can be found in the Russian wikipedia.

Yat in South Slavic languages

In the central South Slavic group, yat has morphed into three distinct forms: e, (i)je and i, and this has become one of the differentiating criteria between the dialects. See Serbo-Croatian language#Rendering of yat for details.

Code positions

Yat is present in Unicode, though it is often absent from commonly available fonts. If your font does include it, you should see the capital and small yats here: Ѣѣ.

Its HTML Entities are Ѣ or Ѣ for the capital and ѣ or ѣ for the small letter.

See also

• Yus