little yus
- noun
- Specialized
:
yus pequeño
- The little yus was used to represent a nasalized vowel in Old Church Slavonic manuscripts.
Examples
-
The letter little yus no longer appears in modern Cyrillic alphabets.
-
Scholars study the usage of little yus to understand historical Slavic phonology.
-
The little yus is an important character in early Slavic scripts.
-
Scholars study the little yus to understand its historical significance.
-
The little yus was used to represent a nasalized vowel in Old Church Slavonic manuscripts.
-
Scholars study the little yus to understand its historical significance.
-
The little yus is an important character in early Slavic scripts.
Surface Forms
Morphology
little + yus
The compound is a straightforward adjective + noun (little + yus), so a learner who knows 'yus' as a character would reasonably infer this refers to a smaller or variant form of that character. However, the precise historical/phonetic function (a letter representing a nasalized front vowel in early Slavic scripts) is specialized and not predictable from the constituents alone, making the transparency only partial.
Etymology
The noun little yus comes from old Slavic alphabets, where a small letter called yus showed a 'nose' vowel, a vowel made partly through the nose. It was called 'little' to tell it apart from a larger nasal letter called 'big yus', so today little yus means that old letter and the nasal sound it marked.
