Izhitsa

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Cyrillic letter Izhitsa
Cyrillic alphabet
А	Б	В	Г	Ґ	Ѓ	Д
Ђ	Е	Ѐ	Ё	Є	Ж	З
Ѕ	И	Ѝ	І	Ї	Й	Ј
К	Ќ	Л	Љ	М	Н	Њ
О	П	Р	С	Т	Ћ	У
Ў	Ф	Х	Ц	Ч	Џ	Ш
Щ	Ъ	Ы	Ь	Э	Ю	Я
Non-Slavic letters
Ӑ	Ӓ	Ә	Ӛ	Ӕ	Ҕ	Ӗ
Ғ	Ӷ	Ӏ	Ӂ	Җ	Ӝ	Ҙ
Ӟ	Ӡ	Ӣ	Ӥ	Ҋ	Ҡ	Қ
Ҟ	Ҝ	Ӄ	Ӆ	Ӎ	Ң	Ҥ
Ӊ	Ӈ	Ө	Ӫ	Ӧ	Ҧ	Ҏ
Ҫ	Ҷ	Ҹ	Ӵ	Ҽ	Ҿ	Ӌ
Ҩ	Ҳ	Һ	Ҭ	Ҵ	Ӳ	Ӯ
Ү	Ұ	Ӱ	Ӹ	Ҍ	Ӭ
Archaic letters
Ҁ	Ѹ	Ѡ	Ѿ	Ѻ	Ѣ	ІА
Ѥ	Ѧ	Ѫ	Ѩ	Ѭ	Ѯ	Ѱ
Ѳ	Ѵ	Ѷ

Izhitsa (Ѵ, ѵ) is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. It was used to represent upsilon (Υ, υ) in words derived from Greek, such as сѵнодъ (sünodǔ='synod'). However, because it made the same sound /i/ as the normal letter и, it was considered superfluous.

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: мѵро (müro='myrrh') and its derivatives. The orthographical reform of 1918 does not mention the letter at all, thus 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 nineteenth century and eliminated the letter, but the old spelling was used in some places as late as in 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, 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 or even might be replaced by 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” is slightly misleading. Izhitsa with kendema is not a separate letter of alphabet, but it may have personal position in computer encodings (Unicode is the case). 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.

[edit] Code positions

Izhitsa is supported by Unicode.

Character encoding	Case	Binary	Hexadecimal	Decimal
Unicode	Capital	0000010001110100	0474	1140
	Small	0000010001110101	0475	1141

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