Izhitsa - (New) Church Slavonic

(New) Church Slavonic

Izhitsa is still in use in the Church Slavonic language. Like Greek ypsilon, it can be pronounced /i/ as и, or /v/ as в. The basic distinction rule is simple: izhitsa with stress and/or aspiration marks is a vowel and therefore pronounced /i/; izhitsa without diacritical marks is a consonant and pronounced /v/. Unstressed /i/-sounding izhitsas are marked with a special diacritical mark, the so-called kendema or kendima (from the Greek word κέντημα ). The shape of kendema over izhitsa may vary: in books of Russian origin, it typically looks like double grave or sometimes like double acute. In older Serbian books, kendema most often looked like two dots (trema) or might even be replaced by a surrogate combination of aspiration and acute. These shape distinctions (with the exception of aspiration+acute) have no orthographical meaning and must be considered just as font style variations, so the Unicode name “izhitsa with double grave” is slightly misleading. Izhitsa with kendema (majuscule: Ѷ, minuscule: ѷ) is not a separate letter of the alphabet, but it may have personal position in computer encodings (e.g., Unicode). Historically, izhitsa with kendema corresponds to the Greek ypsilon with trema (or διαλυτικά: Ϋ, ϋ). While in modern editions of ancient and modern Greek the trema is used only to prevent a digraph (as <ευ> versus <εϋ> ), Slavonic kendema-usage still continues that of many mediaeval Greek manuscripts, where the "diaeresis" sign was often used simply to mark an ypsilon or iota as such, irrespective of any other vowels (e.g. δϊαλϋτϊκά, which would not be correct by today's conventions).