On Sat, 30 Apr 2005 00:41:57 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> What is "yat," and which round of abolitions was it abolished in? Peter
> the Great's? 18th-19th-c. usage? the Soviet reform? Russian has a lot
> fewer letters than Old Cyrillic.

Definite:
Capital letter yat: U+0462
Small letter yat: U+0463

Discontinued (in Russia) after the 1917 revolution; iirc, iirc, my father
had used it; he was born in Voronezh. I think I can remember his
regretting its discontinuance. (See the refs.)

Of interest is its very close resemblance to [Cyrillic little yus], in the
Glagolitic alphabet.

That remids me of a comment I once read about the difference between a
small f and a small k in a fraktur typeface: an area of 40 millionths of a
square inch.

Refs.:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yat>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography>

It's a bit surprising to be helping a bit, here, and on-topic, at that!

The Unicode book taught me to recognize the names of historic Cyrillic
letters. Scanning the list again, I see "Combining Cyrillic psili
pneumata" (!). (I avoided all caps for the name, which is more correct,
out of courtesy.) Indeed, scanning that part of the list helps to show the
Greek roots of some Cyrillic letters.

Best regards,

(Btw, our family name changed from Bessaraboff in 1946; marginal literacy
for foreign names in the USA and the Cold War were incentives.)
--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
If you're determined to be afraid, choose wisely
what to be afraid of.