Uk (Cyrillic)

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Uk (Ѹ, ѹ) is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. It was originally a digraph of О and У written horizontally. To save space, it was often written as a vertical ligature, and in modern times has been replaced by the simple У.

Borrowing from Greek

Both the horizontal and the vertical digraph were borrowed from the Greek alphabet, which uses the digraph ου (omicron-upsilon) for /u/ up to now, but no longer uses the vertical ligature, which is frequently found in Greek medieval manuscripts (see Ou (letter)).

Development of the use of Uk in Old East Slavic

The simplification of the ligature оу to у was first brought about in the Old East Slavic texts and only later taken over into South Slavic languages.

One can see this development in the Novgorod birchbark letters: The degree to which this letter was used here differed in two positions: in word-initial position or before a vowel (except for the jers), and after a consonant.

Before a consonant, ѹ was used 89% of the time in the writings before 1100. By 1200, it was used 61% of the time, with the letter у used 14% of the time; by 1300, ѹ had reached 28%, surpassed by у at 45%. From the late 1300's on, there are no more instances of ѹ being used in this position, with у appearing 95% of the time.

The decrease in usage was more gradual after a consonant. Although there are no instances of the use of у in this position before c. 1200, ѹ gradually decreased from 88% before 1100 to 57% by 1200. ѹ remained steady between 47% and 44% until 1400, when it experienced another decrease to 32%. Meanwhile, the use of у increased from 4% in the early 1200s, to 20% by the mid-1200s, 38% by the mid 1300s, and 58% by the early 1400s.

References

Zaliznjak, A. A. Drevnenovgorodskij dialekt. Jazyki slavjanskoj kul'tury: Moskva. 2004.

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