Yo (Cyrillic)
Encyclopedia
- Not to be confused with latin ËËis a letter in the Albanian, Ripuarian, Uyghur Latin Script, Ladin, and Kashubian languages. This letter also appears in Afrikaans, Dutch, French, Abruzzese dialect , and Luxembourgish language as a variant of letter "e"...
Yo (Ё ё; italics: Ё ё) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
. In Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
, the letter ⟨Ё⟩ is named CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER IO.
It commonly represents the sounds /jo/, like the pronunciation of ⟨Yo⟩ in "York".
Yo is romanized using the Latin letters ⟨yo⟩.
Usage
Yo was first used in RussianRussian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, where its status is now ambiguous.
Yo occurs as a discrete letter in the Cyrillic alphabets of Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
, Rusyn
Rusyn language
Rusyn , also known in English as Ruthenian, is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Central Europe. Some linguists treat it as a distinct language and it has its own ISO 639-3 code; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian...
, Mongolian
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
and many Caucasian
Languages of the Caucasus
The languages of the Caucasus are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea....
and Turkic
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
languages.
Russian
The letter Yo is the seventh letter of the alphabet, but although it indicates a distinct sound from YeYe (Cyrillic)
Ye is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. In some languages this letter is called E.It commonly represents the vowel or , like the pronunciation of ⟨e⟩ in "yes".Ye is romanized using the Latin letter E....
, it is treated as the same letter for purposes of alphabetisation and sorting. Thus in the dictionary, comes after and before . It is usually printed as ⟨е⟩.
The letter ⟨ё⟩ indicates the phoneme /o/ following a palatalized consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
(or occasionally after ⟨ж⟩, ⟨ч⟩, ⟨ш⟩, or ⟨щ⟩) in a stressed
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
syllable. In initial or post-vocalic position, it represents /jo/, also exclusively under stress.
In modern Russian, the reflex of Common Slavonic
Proto-Slavic language
Proto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century AD. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic...
/e/ under stress and following a palatalized consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
but not preceding a palatalized consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
is /o/. (Compare, for example, Russian moyo ("my" neuter nominative and accusative singular) and Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
/Czech
Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
/Slovak
Slovak language
Slovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...
/Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian language
Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
/Slovenian
Slovenian language
Slovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. It is the first language of about 1.85 million people and is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union...
moje.) However, since this sound change took place after the introduction of writing, the letter ⟨е⟩ continued to be written in this position. It was not until the 18th century that efforts were made to represent the sound in writing.
From the mid-1730s it appears sporadically as ⟨іо⟩ or ⟨⟩, a letter-combination which was officially adopted on 18 November 1783 at a session of the Russian Academy
Russian Academy
The Russian Academy or Imperial Russian Academy was established in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1783 by Empress Catherine II of Russia and princess Dashkova as a research center for Russian language and Russian literature, following the example of the Académie française...
under the presidency of Princess Dashkova
Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova
Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova was the closest female friend of Empress Catherine the Great and a major figure of the Russian Enlightenment...
, and it was used in the Academy Dictionary (1789–94), but it never gained great popularity. The letter ⟨ё⟩ was first used in print in 1795 by the poet Ivan Dmitriev
Ivan Dmitriev
Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev was a Russian statesman and poet associated with the sentamentalist movement in Russian literature.Dmitriev was born at his father's estate in the government of Simbirsk...
and was soon taken up by such influential writers as Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin
Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin
Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin was a Russian writer, poet, historian, and critic. He is best remembered for his History of the Russian State, a 12-volume national history.- Early life :...
and Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin
Derzhavin
Derzhavin may refer to:* Gavrila Derzhavin, Russian poet and statesman* 23409 Derzhavin, minor planet...
, which assured its acceptance in the literary norm.
The diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
does not appear above any other letter in Russian and serves no purpose except to differentiate between ⟨е⟩ and ⟨ё⟩.
Except for a brief period after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, the use of ⟨ё⟩ 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 ⟨е⟩ is used, and ⟨ё⟩ occurs only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity (for example, to distinguish between ("everybody") and ("everything") when it is not obvious from the context which is meant) or in words (principally proper nouns) whose pronunciation may not be familiar to the reader. Recent recommendations (2006) from the Russian Language Institute are to use ⟨ё⟩ in proper nouns in order to avoid the wrong pronunciation. It is perfectly permissible, however, to mark ⟨ё⟩ whenever it occurs, which is the preference of some Russian authors and periodicals.
The fact that ⟨ё⟩ is frequently replaced with ⟨е⟩ in print often causes some confusion to both Russians and non-Russians, as it makes Russian words and names harder to transcribe accurately. One recurring problem is with Russian surnames, as both (-ev) and (-yov) are common endings. Thus the English-speaking world knows two leaders of the former Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
as Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
and Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
though their surnames end in Russian with , better transcribed -yov (which is why many English-speakers pronounce these names as if they end in -ov, even though they spell them with -ev). Some words and names have also changed in Russian because of the confusion: some have had their ⟨ё⟩ replaced with ⟨е⟩, and some ⟨е⟩ replaced with ⟨ё⟩.
Transcription of foreign words
⟨Ё⟩ can be used in Russian transcriptionCyrillization
A Cyrillization is a system for rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than the Cyrillic alphabet into a Cyrillic alphabet. A Cyrillization scheme needs to be applied, for example, to transcribe names of German, Chinese, or American people and places for use in...
of foreign words originating from languages that use the sound /ø/, spelled eu/ö/ő/ø (Dutch, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish, Hungarian), such as "Gerhard Schröder", whose last name is transliterated as (while the ⟨ё⟩-less Bulgarian uses ⟨ьo⟩ for the same vowel). This letter is also often used for transcribing the English vowel /ɜr/, in names. E.g. for "Robert Burns" or for "Hearst"/"Hurst"/"Hirst".
However, the sound [jo] in words from European languages is normally transcribed into Russian as ⟨йо⟩ in initial and post-vocalic position, and ⟨ьo⟩ after consonants. E.g. for "New York" and for "battalion".
The letter ⟨ё⟩ is normally used to transcribe the Japanese ⟨よ⟩ into Russian Cyrillic, appearing in the Russian transcription of Japanese
Cyrillization of Japanese
Cyrillization of Japanese is the practice of expressing Japanese sounds using Cyrillic characters. It is commonly accepted in Russia.Below is a cyrillization system for the Japanese language known as the Yevgeny Polivanov system...
that would appear as yo (よ), kyo (きょ), sho (しょ) etc. in Hepburn Romanization
Hepburn romanization
The is named after James Curtis Hepburn, who used it to transcribe the sounds of the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet in the third edition of his Japanese–English dictionary, published in 1887. The system was originally proposed by the in 1885...
. There are a few exceptions: for example, "Yokohama" is spelled in Russian with ⟨Йо⟩, not ⟨Ё⟩. Similarly, ⟨ё⟩ is used to transcribe into Russian Cyrillic
Kontsevich system
The Kontsevich system for the Cyrillization of the Korean language was created by the Russian scholar Lev Kontsevitch on the basis of the earlier system designed by Aleksandr Kholodovich...
the Korean sounds romanized
Revised Romanization of Korean
The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea proclaimed by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, replacing the older McCune–Reischauer system...
as ⟨yo⟩. However, the ⟨ё⟩ is not used in the Russian transcription of the Chinese language, as the syllable that is spelled you in pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
is represented by ⟨ю⟩ in the standard Russian transcription, and yao is ⟨яо⟩.
Belarusian and Rusyn
Yo is the seventh letter of the BelarusianBelarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
alphabet and the ninth letter of the Rusyn
Rusyn language
Rusyn , also known in English as Ruthenian, is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Central Europe. Some linguists treat it as a distinct language and it has its own ISO 639-3 code; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian...
alphabet.
In Belarusian and Rusyn, the letters ⟨е⟩ and ⟨ё⟩ are separate and not interchangeable.
Dungan language
Unlike the Russian spelling system, ⟨ё⟩ is mandatory in the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Dungan languageDungan language
The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China.-History:...
. In that Sinitic language, the ⟨е⟩/⟨ё⟩ distinction is crucial, as the former is used such as to write the syllable that would have the pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
spelling of yao in Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese, or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
, while the latter is used for the syllable that appears as ye in pinyin. ⟨Ё⟩ is very prominent in Dungan spelling, since the very common syllable appearing as yang in Pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
is spelled ⟨ён⟩ in Dungan.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Ε ε : Greek Epsilon
- Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye
- О о : Cyrillic letter O
- Э э : Cyrillic letter E
- E e : Latin letter EEE is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...
- Ë ë : Latin letter ËËis a letter in the Albanian, Ripuarian, Uyghur Latin Script, Ladin, and Kashubian languages. This letter also appears in Afrikaans, Dutch, French, Abruzzese dialect , and Luxembourgish language as a variant of letter "e"...
Computing codes
| character | Ё | ё | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER IO | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IO |
||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1025 | 0401 | 1105 | 0451 |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
208 129 | D0 81 | 209 145 | D1 91 |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Ё | Ё | ё | ё |
| KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters... and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,... |
179 | B3 | 163 | A3 |
| CP 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:... |
133 | 85 | 132 | 84 |
| Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages... |
168 | A8 | 184 | B8 |
| ISO-8859-5 | 161 | A1 | 241 | F1 |
| Mac Cyrillic MacCyrillic encoding The Macintosh Cyrillic encoding is used in Apple Macintosh computers to represent texts in the Cyrillic script.Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point and its decimal code point. Only the second half of the table is shown, the first half being the same as ASCII.... |
221 | DD | 222 | DE |