Wikipedia: Ya (letter)

Ya (letter)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Яя Яя

Ya (Я) is the 33rd and last letter of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. It is pronounced as /ja/ (SAMPA). In Russian language, "Я" is the personal pronoun "I".

Я is actually a hybrid of two historic letters. One is A iotified (IA), a ligature of І and А, similar to letters Ю or Ѥ. The other is Little Yus (or Yus small, Ѧ). Over time, phonetic distinction between IA and Ѧ was lost, so when Peter I introduced his "civil script" in 1708, the single letter Ya (Я) was substituted for both. Modern Я looks just like reversed Latin letter R, see: ЯR.

Though the two letters (Я and R) are completely different in both origin and pronunciation, in the West it is popularly thought (for example see [1]) that they have something in common, that Я is some sort of "Russian R", and for this reason Я is sometimes used instead of R in titles of books, movies and computer games that are happening in Russia, for example: TETЯIS (another letter with similar fate is Cyrillic I (И), used instead of N). Cyrillic R looks like Latin P.

As mentioned above, Я is a modern invention; it is not part of the old Cyrillic alphabet and does not exist in the Glagolitic, Greek or Latin alphabets. It has no numerical value and no name other than "Ya".

In Unicode, Я shares the same codepoints with IA (A iotified). The actual glyph depends on the font.

Code positions

Character encoding	Case	Binary	Hexadecimal	Octal	Decimal
Unicode	Capital	0000010000101111	042F	2057	1071
Unicode	Small	0000010001001111	044F	2117	1103
KOI	Capital	11110001	F1	361	241
KOI	Small	11010001	D1	321	209
Windows 1251	Capital	11011111	DF	337	223
Windows 1251	Small	11111111	FF	377	255
ISO 8859-5	Capital	11001111	CF	317	207
ISO 8859-5	Small	11101111	EF	357	239

Its HTML entity is Я or &#x42F for capital and я or я for small letter.

	Wikipedia: Ya (letter)

Code positions

See also