Yery, Yeru, Ery or Eru, usually called Ы in modern Russian or еры yerý historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the phoneme after non-palatalised consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets. The letter is usually romanised into English and most other West European languages as : Krylov. However, Latin may be used for other purposes as well. That spelling matches Polish, which uses to represent a very similar sound. Russian is used to transliterate Polish into Cyrillic: Maryla.
Origin
Like :Category:Cyrillic_ligatures|many other Cyrillic letters, it was originally from a ligature , formed from Yer and or Izhe. In mediaeval manuscripts, it is almost always found as or. Once the letters and later lost their values as vowels in the Slavic languages, the current simplified form evolved.
Usage
The soft sign has the same trill. Because of phonological processes, the actual realisation of after alveolar consonants is retracted to a close central unrounded vowel or, after labials:,,,. In Rusyn, it denotes a sound a bit harder than and close to the Romanian sound î, also written â. In some situations, it may occur after palatalised consonants, and it often follows,, and. While vowel letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may be divided into iotated and non-iotated pairs, is more complicated. It appears only after hard consonants, its phonetic value differs from, and there is some scholarly disagreement as to whether or not and denote different phonemes. Native Russian words do not begin with , but there are many proper and common nouns of non-Russian origin beginning with it: Kim Jong-un and Eulji Mundeok, a Korean military leader; and Ytyk-Kyuyol, Ygyatta, a village and a river in Sakha Republic respectively. In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery is not used as the language lacks the sound. In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery was mixed with and was phased out in the second half of the 19th century. According to Ukrainian academician Hryhoriy Pivtorak, the letter was replaced with so called "Cyrillic i" which in Ukrainian language pronounced as and appeared due to the merger of letters and . The yery letter could be found in several earlier versions of Ukrainian writing system that were introduced in the 19th century among which are "Pavlovsky writing system", "Slobda Ukraine writing system", "Yaryzhka", and others. The letter is also used in Cyrillic-based alphabets of several Turkic and Mongolic languages for a darker vowel. The corresponding letter in Latin-based scripts are , I with bowl, and the soft sign In Tuvan, the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.
