Yo (Cyrillic)
Yo, Jo, or, Io is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Unicode, the letter is named CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER IO.
In English, the letter Yo is romanized using the Latin ë, ë or yo/jo for Russian, and as i͡o, yo, or ë for Belarusian. In international systems, Yo is romanized as ë.
It was derived from the Cyrillic letter Ye.
Pronunciation
The letter occurs in a stressed syllable in the overwhelming majority of Russian and Belarusian words. In Russian, unstressed occurs only in compound numerals and a few derived terms, where it is considered an exception.It is a so-called iotated vowel. At the start of a word or after a vowel, it represents the consonant-vowel sequence, like in 'York'. The same applies if is preceded by either or.
After a consonant letter, the letter indicates the phoneme together with palatalization of the preceding consonant. No sound occurs between the consonant and the vowel in this case.
The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of can vary because of allophony in Slavic languages. In Russian, it is pronounced, with an vowel similar to bird in New Zealand or South African English; see palatalization for some background.
Usage
Yo was first used in Russian, but its status in that language is now ambiguous. Yo occurs as a discrete letter in the Cyrillic alphabets of Belarusian, Rusyn, Mongolian and many Caucasian and Turkic languages.Russian
The letter Yo or Jo is the seventh letter of the alphabet, but although it indicates a distinct sound from Ye, it is often treated as the same letter for alphabetisation and sorting. In the dictionary, ёж comes after едо́к and before е́здить.represents the phoneme after or a soft consonant, and is almost always stressed. It alternates with, written in non-stressed positions. Unstressed appears only in compound words, in derivatives of the name of the letter itself, in loanwords.
In modern Russian, Common Slavonic in a stressed syllable generally became after a palatalized consonant, unless the vowel was followed by a second palatalized consonant. For example, compare ёж from *ežь in contrast to лещ from *leščь; or осётр from *esetrъ in contrast to осeть from *esetь. However, since the sound change took place after the introduction of writing, the letter continued to be written in that position.
For a long time, no distinction was made in written Russian between the vowels and after or after a palatalized consonant. It was not until the 18th century that efforts were made to create a distinct spelling for or. From the mid-1730s, there was sporadic use of a digraph, or alternatively a ligature with a top joiner, but this was cumbersome and used rarely. This digraph and a new letter for the sound were proposed as additions to the official alphabet in 1783 at a session of the Russian Academy under the presidency of Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova, but both propositions were rejected by the academicians and the Metropolitan of Novgorod and Saint Petersburg Gavriil. At that time, the sounds — and were common in everyday Central Russian speech, but Church-Slavonic-styled pronunciation with – and was preferred when reading literary texts. Other variant spellings used for or were о, ьо, їô, ió, ио.
In 1797, instead of existing options, the letter "Ё" was created by Russian Imperial historian, writer, poet and critic Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin. It was used for the first time in the 2nd book of "Aonides" in his poem "Sophistiated Solomon's Wisdom, or Thoughts Selected from Ecclesiastes" to create a rhyme between the words слёзы and розы . In other places of the poem he used the spelling слезы .
The diaeresis ◌̈ does not appear above any other letter in Russian. It serves no purpose except to differentiate between and.
Except for a brief period after World War II, the use of was never obligatory in standard Russian orthography. By and large, it is used only in dictionaries and in pedagogical literature intended for children and students of Russian as a second language. Otherwise, is used, and occurs only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity and всё or in words whose pronunciation may not be familiar to the reader. Recent recommendations from the Russian Language Institute are to use in proper nouns to avoid an incorrect pronunciation. It is permitted, however, to mark whenever it occurs, which is the preference of some Russian authors and periodicals.
The fact that is frequently replaced with in print often causes some confusion to both Russians and non-Russians, as it makes it more difficult for Russian words and names to be transcribed. One recurring problem is with Russian surnames, as both -ев and -ёв are common endings. Thus, the English-speaking world knows two leaders of the former Soviet Union as Khrushchev and Gorbachev, but their surnames end in Russian with -ёв, better transcribed -yov/-ov.
The advent of the computer has had a great influence on the process of substitution with for a counterintuitive reason: currently, the Russian alphabet contains 33 letters including, and codepage designers usually prefer to omit so that all Russian letters can be placed into sections of 16 letters. Some examples are pre-Unicode character pages 866 for Microsoft DOS and 1251 for Microsoft Windows. Since in both cases, was placed outside its alphabetically correct position, it made text sorting more complex. Software developers would then choose to substitute all letters with at an early stage of text processing to simplify later stages.
Transcription of foreign words
can be used in Russian transcription of foreign words originating from languages that use the sound or, spelled eu/ö/ő/ø, such as "Gerhard Schröder", whose last name is transliterated as Шрёдер because of its similarity to the native Russian sound . This letter is also often used for transcribing the English vowel, in names like Роберт Бёрнс for "Robert Burns" or Хёрст for "Hearst"/"Hurst"/"Hirst". However, several authoritative sources recommend the transcription ер for. Word-initial and post-vocalic or is usually transcribed in Russian.However, the sound, in words from European languages, is normally transcribed into Russian as in initial and post-vocalic position and after consonants: Нью-Йорк for "New York" and батальон for "battalion". An apparent exception is the Russian word for "serious", which is spelled серьёзный rather than сериозный. However, this is due to the fact that this word stems from French sérieux with an sound.
The letter is normally used to transcribe the Japanese into Russian Cyrillic, appearing in the Russian transcription of Japanese that would appear as yo, kyo, sho etc. in Hepburn Romanization, but there are a few traditional spellings which break this rule. For example, "Yokohama" is spelled in Russian with, not. Similarly, is used to transcribe into Russian Cyrillic the Korean sounds romanized as, and confusingly also for with the same letter. In such transcriptions, as well as in languages other than Russian where ё is used, the use of ё rather than е is obligatory.
The -less Bulgarian uses and for transcribing the foreign vowels or, and also for French labialized schwa: "de" and "le" are transcribed де and ле in Russian but дьо and льо in Bulgarian.
However, in Ukrainian, the standard way for transcribing or in foreign names is .
Legal issues
It is thought that the letter is found in at least 2500 surnames used in Russia and other states of the former USSR. It is common for a person who has one of these surnames to possess some legal documents where the name is written with a, and some that use the simple instead. In other situations, a child's birth certificate may have a and the parents' identity papers all have. On occasion such mismatches caused problems to citizens when receiving inheritances or completing property transactions.Belarusian and Rusyn
Yo is the seventh letter of the Belarusian alphabet and the ninth letter of the Prešov Rusyn alphabet of Slovakia. In the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet, yo is absent.In Belarusian and Prešov Rusyn, the letters and are separate and not interchangeable.
Dungan
Unlike the Russian spelling system, is mandatory in the Cyrillic alphabet used by Dungan. In that Sinitic language, the / distinction is crucial, as the former is used such as to write the syllable that would have the pinyin spelling of ye in Standard Chinese, and the latter is used for the syllable that appears as yao in pinyin. is very prominent in Dungan spelling since the very common syllable appearing as yang in Pinyin is spelled in Dungan.Mongolian
In the Cyrillic alphabet for the Mongolian language, is the seventh letter, and it is always different from. It represents the syllable /jɔ/. For example, the word for "two" in Mongolian, "khoyor", is spelled as хоёр.Tajik
In the Tajik language, ⟨ё⟩ is used for the syllable /jɔː/.Ukrainian
In some older alphabets used for Ukrainian, such as Panteleimon Kulish's Kulishivka's alphabet, was formerly used for the sound —. This letter no longer exists in the modern Ukrainian alphabet.In modern Ukrainian spelling, the sound — is written as after soft consonants in the middle of words, and elsewhere. The standard way to transcribe the foreign phonemes or in Ukrainian is with the letter.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye
- Ë ë : E with diaeresis - an Albanian and Kashubian letter
- Ε ε : Greek letter epsilon
- E e : Latin letter E
- Ɛ ɛ : Latin letter epsilon
- О о : Cyrillic letter O
- Ө ө : Cyrillic letter Oe
- Ӭ ӭ : Cyrillic letter E with diaeresis
Computing codes