And iotated

Ꙗ , ꙗ (conventional name: I , and iotated or azotized ) - the 34th letter of the Old Slavonic Cyrillic alphabet . Built as a ligature of letters I and A. It is absent in the glagolitic - the corresponding sounds are indicated by the letter yat (Ⱑ) there. It does not have a numerical value . At the beginning of words and after vowels it means sounds [ j a ], after consonants - their palatalization and sound [ a ]. In Church Slavonic writing, it is usually combined with small Us ( Ѧ ) and placed in 34th place in the alphabet (for more details on the relationship of these two forms, see I (Cyrillic) ). Until the XVII century, there was a practice of using these two letters: iotated az was found at the beginning of words and after a vowel, and small yus - in the middle and end of words after consonants. The rules of the Church Slavonic language of the Russian version require the use of the inscription Ꙗ at the beginning of words, and actually Ѧ - in the middle and at the end, with the following two exceptions:

• the personal pronoun ѧ҆̀ (= them, the 3rd person of the wine. pad. plural and double. numbers) is written through Ѧ (but the relative pronoun formed from it is же even (= which, which, of which) - through Ꙗ ;
• the word ѧ҆zyk and its derivatives are written differently depending on the meaning: through Ѧ the organ of speech and the means of communication are written, while the people ( наше our gallѡv and with them two ꙗ҆zy̑k ’) - through Ꙗ .

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Above : spellings of iotated basics , the first two are found in the semi-charter, the rest are in cursive
Below : spelling variants of small usa , the first three are found in the semi-joint, the rest are in cursive

Part of the page from the Ukrainian expatriate primer.

The Russian civil font was not even temporarily included (however, in the 2nd half of the 19th century it was included in the Bulgarian civil font of some publications). The letter was modified in cursive writing : the left side was gradually lost, turning only to a stroke, so it began to look like an “a” with a “c” -shaped tail in the upper left (a similar metamorphosis occurred with cursive Yu) ^[1] . From this mark comes a somewhat outdated form of the handwritten Ukrainian “I”, resembling the connected below “ɛı” or “ ꞛ ” ( ) In the graphic of contemporary Russian writing, there are no traces of the letter (the outline of the present self comes from the small us).