Yo (Cyrillic)

: This section describes the pronunciation in Russian and Belarusian. Other languages may have subtle differences.

The letter {{angle bracket|ё}} occurs in a stressed syllable in the overwhelming majority of Russian and Belarusian words. In Russian, unstressed {{angle bracket|ё}} occurs only in compound numerals and a few derived terms, where it is considered an exception.

It is a so-called iotated vowel. At the start of a word or after a vowel, it represents the consonant-vowel sequence {{IPA|/jo/}}, like in 'York'. The same applies if {{angle bracket|ё}} is preceded by either {{angle bracket|ъ}} or {{angle bracket|ь}}.

After a consonant letter, the letter {{angle bracket|ё}} indicates the phoneme {{IPA|/o/}} together with palatalization of the preceding consonant (if it can be palatalized). No {{IPA|/j/}} sound occurs between the consonant and the vowel in this case.

The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of {{angle bracket|ё}} can vary because of allophony in Slavic languages. In Russian, it is pronounced {{IPA|[jɵ]}}, with an {{IPAblink|ɵ}} vowel similar to bird in New Zealand or South African English; see palatalization for some background.

Yo was first used in Russian, but its status in that language is now ambiguous. Yo occurs as a discrete letter in the Cyrillic alphabets of Belarusian, Rusyn, Mongolian and many Caucasian and Turkic languages.

File:Nikolay Karamzin by Alexey Venezianov (1828, National Pushkin Museum) crop.jpg created the letter ё]]

The letter Yo or Jo is the seventh letter of the alphabet, but although it indicates a distinct sound from Ye, it is often treated as the same letter for alphabetisation and sorting. In the dictionary, {{lang|ru|ёж}} (hedgehog) comes after {{lang|ru|едо́к}} (eater) and before {{lang|ru|е́здить}} (to go).

{{angle bracket|Ё}} represents the phoneme {{IPA|/o/}} after {{IPA|/j/}} or a soft consonant (or occasionally after {{angle bracket|ж}}, {{angle bracket|ш}}), and is almost always stressed. It alternates with {{angle bracket|е}}, written in non-stressed positions. Unstressed {{angle bracket|ё}} appears only in compound words (in this case it may be considered to have secondary stress; most notably, {{angle bracket|ё}} occurs in words containing the prefixes {{lang|ru|трёх-}} 'three-' and {{lang|ru|четырёх-}} 'four-'), in derivatives of the name of the letter {{angle bracket|ё}} itself ({{lang|ru|ёфика́тор}} - yoficator), in loanwords ({{lang|ru|кёнигсбе́ргский}} - adjective from {{lang|de|Königsberg}}, {{lang|ru|сёрфинги́ст}} from {{lang|en|surfing}} - surfer, {{lang|ru|сёдзё}} - {{lang|ja|shōjo}}, {{lang|ru|гёмбёц}} - {{lang|hu|gömböc}}).

In modern Russian, Common Slavonic {{IPA|/e/}} in a stressed syllable generally became {{IPA|/o/}} after a palatalized consonant, unless the vowel was followed by a second palatalized consonant.{{efn|Or Common Slavonic {{IPA|/e/}} generally became modern Russian {{IPA|/jo/}} when stressed and not followed by a palatalized consonant.}} For example, compare {{lang|ru|ёж}} {{Audio-IPA|Ru-ёж.ogg|[jɵʂ]|help=no}} ("hedgehog") from *ežьTrubachyov, Oleg, editor (1979), Этимологический словарь славянских языков [Etymological dictionary of Slavic languages] (in Russian), numbers 6 (*e – *golva), Moscow: Nauka, page 37 in contrast to {{lang|ru|лещ}} {{Audio-IPA|LL-Q7737 (rus)-Rominf-лещ.wav|[lʲeɕː]|help=no}} ("bream") from *leščь;Trubachyov, Oleg, editor (1987),Этимологический словарь славянских языков [Etymological dictionary of Slavic languages] (in Russian), numbers 14 (*labati – *lěteplъjь), Moscow: Nauka, page 142 or {{lang|ru|осётр}} {{IPA|[ɐˈsʲɵtr]}} ("sturgeon") from *esetrъDerksen, Rick (2008), Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 4), Leiden; Boston: Brill. p. 145 in contrast to {{lang|ru|осeть}} {{IPA|[ɐˈsʲetʲ]}} ("granary, rack for drying grain") from *esetь.{{efn|A rare exception to this rule is {{lang|ru|тётя}} {{IPA| [ˈtʲɵtʲə]}} "aunt" from CSl. *teta.Snoj, Marko (2016) “téta”, in Slovenski etimološki slovar [Slovenian Etymology Dictionary] (in Slovene), 3rd edition Sometimes, {{IPA|/o/}} between palatalized consonants occurs because of morphological analogy: {{lang|ru|клён}} {{Audio-IPA|Ru-клён.ogg|[klʲɵn]|help=no}} "maple", prepositional case {{lang|ru|(о) клёне}} {{IPA|[(ɐ) klʲɵnʲe]}}. Additionally, nouns whose nominative singular form ends in -я {{IPA|[ʲa]}} have instrumental singular form ending in -ёй [ʲɵj] ~ -ёю [ʲɵjʊ] when stressed; e.g. {{lang|ru|земля́}} "earth (nom. sg.)" {{IPA|[zʲɪˈmlʲa]}} vs. {{lang|ru|землёй}} {{IPA|[zʲɪˈmlʲɵj]}}, {{lang|ru|землёю}} {{IPA|[zʲɪˈmlʲɵjʊ]}} "earth (instr. sg.)".}} However, since the sound change took place after the introduction of writing, the letter {{angle bracket|е}} continued to be written in that position.

For a long time, no distinction was made in written Russian between the vowels {{IPA|/e/}} and {{IPA|/o/}} after {{IPA|/j/}} or after a palatalized (soft) consonant. It was not until the 18th century that efforts were made to create a distinct spelling for {{IPA|/jo/}} or {{IPA|/ʲo/}}. From the mid-1730s, there was sporadic use of a digraph {{angle bracket|іо}}, or alternatively a ligature with a top joiner {{angle bracket|і͡о}}, but this was cumbersome and used rarely. This digraph and a new letter {{Angle bracket|ґ}} for the sound {{IPA|/ɡ/}} were proposed as additions to the official alphabet in 1783 at a session of the Russian Academy under the presidency of Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova, but both propositions were rejected by the academicians and the Metropolitan of Novgorod and Saint Petersburg Gavriil. At that time, the sounds {{IPA|/jo/}}—{{IPA|/ʲo/}} and {{IPA|/ɡ/}} were common in everyday Central Russian speech, but Church-Slavonic-styled pronunciation with {{IPA|/je/}}–{{IPA|/ʲe/}} and {{IPA|/ɣ/}} was preferred when reading literary texts. Other variant spellings used for {{IPA|/jo/}} or {{IPA|/ʲo/}} were о, ьо, їô, ió, ио.

In 1797, instead of existing options, the letter "Ё" was created by Russian Imperial historian, writer, poet and critic Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin. It was used for the first time in the 2nd book of "Aonides" in his poem "Sophistiated Solomon's Wisdom, or Thoughts Selected from Ecclesiastes" to create a rhyme between the words слёзы [ˈslʲɵzɨ] and розы [ˈrozɨ]. In other places of the poem he used the spelling слезы [ˈslʲezɨ].Е. В. Пчелов, "Буква ё в русской азбуке и письменности",Палеография и кодикология: 300 лет после Монфокона. Материалы (Ред. М. В. Бибиков и др.), Москва, 2008: стр.139–148Грот Я. К. Филологические разыскания. — 1873.Власов С. В. К истории буквы Ё. Легенды и факты. — 2008.Власов С. В. К истокам буквы Ё. — 2019.

The diaeresis ◌̈ does not appear above any other letter in Russian. It serves no purpose except to differentiate between {{angle bracket|е}} and {{angle bracket|ё}}.

{{anchor|diaeresis}}Except for a brief period after World War II, the use of {{angle bracket|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, {{angle bracket|е}} is used, and {{angle bracket|ё}} occurs only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity (such as to distinguish between {{lang|ru|все}} ("everybody") and {{lang|ru|всё}} ("everything") when it is not obvious from the context) 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 {{angle bracket|ё}} in proper nouns to avoid an incorrect pronunciation.«Правила русской орфографии и пунктуации. Полный академический справочник. Под ред. В. В. Лопатина», ЭКСМО, 2006. Стр. 20, § 5 It is permitted, however, to mark {{angle bracket|ё}} whenever it occurs, which is the preference of some Russian authors and periodicals.

The fact that {{angle bracket|ё}} is frequently replaced with {{angle bracket|е}} in print often causes some confusion to both Russians and non-Russians, as it makes it more difficult for Russian words and names to be transcribed. One recurring problem is with Russian surnames, as both {{lang|ru|-ев}} (-ev/-yev) and {{lang|ru|-ёв}} (-yov/-ov) are common endings. Thus, the English-speaking world knows two leaders of the former Soviet Union as Khrushchev and Gorbachev, but their surnames end in Russian with {{lang|ru|-ёв}}, better transcribed -yov/-ov (which is why many English-speakers pronounce these names as if they end in -ov but they spell them with -ev).

The advent of the computer has had a great influence on the process of substitution {{angle bracket|ё}} with {{angle bracket|е}} for a counterintuitive reason: currently, the Russian alphabet contains 33 letters including {{angle bracket|ё}}, and codepage designers usually prefer to omit {{angle bracket|ё}} so that all Russian letters can be placed into sections of 16 letters (16, like other powers of 2, is often preferred in computing over other numbers). Some examples are pre-Unicode character pages 866 for Microsoft DOS and 1251 for Microsoft Windows. Since in both cases, {{angle bracket|ё}} was placed outside its alphabetically correct position, it made text sorting more complex. Software developers would then choose to substitute all {{angle bracket|ё}} letters with {{angle bracket|е}} at an early stage of text processing to simplify later stages.{{citation needed|date=October 2022}}

{{angle bracket|Ё}} can be used in Russian transcription of foreign words originating from languages that use the sound {{IPA|/ø/}} or {{IPA|/œ/}}, spelled eu/ö/ő/ø (French, Germanic languages other than English, Uralic languages), such as "Gerhard Schröder", whose last name is transliterated as {{lang|ru|Шрёдер}} because of its similarity to the native Russian sound [ɵ]. This letter is also often used for transcribing the English vowel {{IPA|/ɜr/}}, in names like {{lang|ru|Роберт Бёрнс}} for "Robert Burns" or {{lang|ru|Хёрст}} for "Hearst"/"Hurst"/"Hirst". However, several authoritative sources recommend the transcription ер for {{IPA|/ɜr/}}. Word-initial and post-vocalic {{IPA|/ø/}} or {{IPA|/œ/}} is usually transcribed {{angle bracket|э}} in Russian (but {{angle bracket|o}} in names from Turkic languages).

However, the sound {{IPA|[jo]|}}, in words from European languages, is normally transcribed into Russian as {{angle bracket|йо}} in initial and post-vocalic position and {{angle bracket|ьo}} after consonants: {{lang|ru|Нью-Йорк}} for "New York" and {{lang|ru|батальон}} for "battalion". An apparent exception is the Russian word for "serious", which is spelled {{lang|ru|серьёзный}} rather than {{lang|ru|сериозный}}. However, this is due to the fact that this word stems from French sérieux with an {{IPA|/ø/}} sound. (In the 19th and the early 20th century, both spellings were in use.Я. К. Грот, Русское правописание, 15-ое изд., Санктпетербург, 1902, p.84 The spelling with {{angle bracket|ио}} —{{angle bracket|іо}} in the pre-1918 orthography— was based on Latin seriosus.)

The letter {{angle bracket|ё}} is normally used to transcribe the Japanese {{angle bracket|よ}} into Russian Cyrillic, appearing in the Russian transcription of Japanese that would appear as yo (よ), kyo (きょ), sho (しょ) etc. in Hepburn Romanization, but there are a few traditional spellings which break this rule. For example, "Yokohama" is spelled in Russian with {{angle bracket|Ио}}, not {{angle bracket|Ё}}. Similarly, {{angle bracket|ё}} is used to transcribe into Russian Cyrillic the Korean sounds romanized as {{angle bracket|yo}}, and confusingly also for {{angle bracket|yeo}} with the same letter. In such transcriptions, as well as in languages other than Russian where ё is used, the use of ё rather than е is obligatory.

The {{angle bracket|ё}}-less Bulgarian uses {{angle bracket|ьo}} {{IPA|/ʲo/}} (after consonants) and {{angle bracket|йo}} {{IPA|/jo/}} (word-initial and after vowels) for transcribing the foreign vowels {{IPA|/ø/}} or {{IPA|/œ/}}, and also for French labialized schwa: "de" and "le" are transcribed {{lang|ru|де}} and {{lang|ru|ле}} in Russian but {{lang|ru|дьо}} and {{lang|ru|льо}} in Bulgarian.

However, in Ukrainian (which also lacks the letter {{angle bracket|ё}} and uses {{angle bracket|йo}} for {{IPA|/jo/}} and {{angle bracket|ьo}} for {{IPA|/ʲo/}}), the standard way for transcribing {{IPA|/ø/}} or {{IPA|/œ/}} in foreign names is {{angle bracket|е}} {{IPA|/e/}}.

It is thought that the letter {{angle bracket|ё}} is found in at least 2500 surnames used in Russia and other states of the former USSR. It is common for a person who has one of these surnames to possess some legal documents (passports, identification cards, marriage and birth certificates, property ownership papers, etc.) where the name is written with a {{angle bracket|ё}}, and some that use the simple {{angle bracket|е}} instead. In other situations, a child's birth certificate may have a {{angle bracket|ё}} and the parents' identity papers all have {{angle bracket|е}}. On occasion such mismatches caused problems to citizens when receiving inheritances or completing property transactions.{{Cite web |title=Надежная защита от экстрадиции из Европы |url=https://novdelo.ru/ |access-date=2023-05-24 |language=ru-RU}}

{{notelist}}

Yo is the seventh letter of the Belarusian alphabet and the ninth letter of the Prešov Rusyn alphabet of Slovakia. In the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet, yo is absent.

In Belarusian and Prešov Rusyn, the letters {{angle bracket|е}} and {{angle bracket|ё}} are separate and not interchangeable.

Unlike the Russian spelling system, {{angle bracket|ё}} is mandatory in the Cyrillic alphabet used by Dungan. In that Sinitic language, the {{angle bracket|е}}/{{angle bracket|ё}} distinction is crucial, as the former is used such as to write the syllable that would have the pinyin spelling of ye in Standard Chinese, and the latter is used for the syllable that appears as yao in pinyin. {{angle bracket|Ё}} is very prominent in Dungan spelling since the very common syllable appearing as yang in Pinyin is spelled {{angle bracket|ён}} in Dungan.

In the Cyrillic alphabet for the Mongolian language, {{angle bracket|ё}} is the seventh letter, and it is always different from {{angle bracket|е}}. It represents the syllable /jɔ/. For example, the word for "two" in Mongolian, "khoyor", is spelled as хоёр.

In the Tajik language, ⟨ё⟩ is used for the syllable /jɔː/.

In some older alphabets used for Ukrainian, such as Panteleimon Kulish's Kulishivka's alphabet, {{angle bracket|ё}} was formerly used for the sound {{IPA|/jo/}}—{{IPA|/ʲo/}}. This letter no longer exists in the modern Ukrainian alphabet.

In modern Ukrainian spelling, the sound {{IPA|/jo/}}—{{IPA|/ʲo/}} is written as {{angle bracket|ьо}} after soft consonants in the middle of words (such as "нього", "him" after a preposition), and {{angle bracket|йо}} elsewhere (such as "його", "him"). The standard way to transcribe the foreign phonemes {{IPA|/ø/}} or {{IPA|/œ/}} in Ukrainian is with the letter {{angle bracket|е}}.

• Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye
• Ë ë : E with diaeresis - an Albanian and Kashubian letter
• Ε ε : Greek letter epsilon
• E e : Latin letter E
• Ɛ ɛ : Latin letter epsilon
• О о : Cyrillic letter O
• Ө ө : Cyrillic letter Oe
• Ӭ ӭ : Cyrillic letter E with diaeresis

{{charmap

|0401|name1=Cyrillic Capital Letter Io

|0451|name2=Cyrillic Small Letter Io

|map1=KOI8-R and KOI8-U |map1char1=B3 |map1char2=A3

|map2=CP 866 |map2char1=F0 |map2char2=F1

|map3=Windows-1251 |map3char1=A8 |map3char2=B8

|map4=ISO 8859-5 |map4char1=A1 |map4char2=F1

|map5=Mac Cyrillic |map5char1=DD |map5char2=DE

}}

There are computer software or extension that is used to restore the Cyrillic letter Yo ⟨{{lang|ru|Ё}}⟩ in Russian texts in places where the letter Ye ⟨{{lang|ru|Е}}⟩ was used instead. ORFO and Yoficator are examples of such.

• Reforms of Russian orthography
• ORFO
• Yoficator

{{Reflist}}

{{Wiktionary|Ё|ё}}

• {{Cite web

|url = http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=5774

|title = Town To Honor Forgotten Letter

|author = Kevin O'Flynn

|publisher = The St. Petersburg Times

}}

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