(Ѵ, ѵ) is a letter of the
Early Cyrillic Alphabet . It was used to represent
Upsilon (Υ, υ) in words derived from
Greek , such as сѵнодъ (= "synod"). However, because it made the same sound as normal "i" (И, и) it was considered superfluous.
In the
Russian Language , the usage of izhitsa became more and more rare during the 18th and 19th centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was only one word with relatively stable spelling with izhitsa: мѵро (= "myrrha") and its derivatives. The orthographical reform of 1918 does not mention the letter at all, thus it "died" with no formal act. The capital form of izhitsa has traditionally been used in Russian books instead of the Roman numeral "V".
The traditional spelling of
Serbian was more conservative. It preserved all etymologically motivated izhitsas in words of Greek origin.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić had reformed the
Serbian Alphabet in the beginning of 19th century and eliminated the letter, but the old spelling was somewhere used as late as in 1880s.
Izhitsa is still in use in the
Church Slavonic Language . It can be pronounced as "и" or as "в". The basic distinction rule is simple: izhitsa with stress and/or aspiration marks is a vowel and therefore pronounced as "и"; izhitsa without diacritical marks is a consonant and pronounced like "в". Unstressed "и"-sounding izhitsas are marked with so-called kendema or kendima (from the Greek word ''kentema''), i.e. two dots (mostly in Serbian books) or double acute or double grave (mostly in Russian books). It corresponds to the Greek upsilon with dialytika (Ϋ, ϋ).
Izhitsa is supported by
Unicode .
Its
HTML Entities are Ѵ or Ѵ for the capital and ѵ or ѵ for the small letter.
