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ѵ
Izhitsa (Ѵ, ѵ; Russian: И́жица) is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. It was used to represent upsilon (Υ, υ) in words derived from Greek, such as сѵнодъ (sünodǔ, 'synod'). It represented the same sound /i/ as the normal letter и in Russian. It was based on the Glagolitic Izhitsa (Ⱛ, ⱛ).
In the Russian language, the usage of izhitsa became progressively more rare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was only one word with relatively stable spelling with izhitsa: мѵро (müro, 'myrrh') and its derivatives. The orthographic reform of 1918 does not mention the letter at all, so 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 the nineteenth century and eliminated the letter, but the old spelling was used in some places as late as the 1880s.
Izhitsa is still in use in the Church Slavonic language. Like modern Greek upsilon, 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 the 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” (majuscule: Ѷ, minuscule: ѷ) is slightly misleading. Izhitsa with kendema 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 upsilon with dialytika (Ϋ, ϋ), but the orthographical meaning is quite different: Greeks use dialytika to prevent building diphthongs out of adjacent vowels, whereas Slavonic izhitsas with kendema may occur anywhere, even with no other vowels nearby.
The izhitsa is also used in the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, used until about 1860.
The izhitsa is sometimes used in place of the new IPA symbol for the labiodental flap because the signs are similar.
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