Yeru or Eru (Ы ы; italics:
Ы ы), usually called Y pronounced as /ru/ in modern Russian or Yery or Ery historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the close central unrounded vowel pronounced as //ɨ// (more rear or upper than i) after non-palatalised (hard) consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets.The letter is usually romanised (y), such that the family name Russian: Крылов is usually written Krylov in English and most other West European languages. That spelling matches the Latin alphabet used for the Slavic language Polish, whose letter (y) represents the same sound. Similarly, (ы) is used for (y) in the cyrillisation of Polish, such that the name Polish: Maryla appears as Russian: Марыля in Russian. Note, however, that the letter (y) also appears in romanisation of other Russian letters both in isolation (such as (й),) and as part of digraphs (such as (я),).
In Rusyn, (ы) represents the close-mid back unrounded vowel pronounced as //ɤ//. In most Turkic languages that use Cyrillic, such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz, (ы) is used to represent the close back unrounded vowel /ɯ/ instead.
Like many other Cyrillic letters, it was originally from a ligature (which is represented in Unicode as Yeru with Back Yer), formed from Yer (ъ) and Dotted I (і) (formerly written either dotless or with two dots) or Izhe ((и) which formerly resembled (н)). In Medieval manuscripts, it is almost always found as (ъі) or (ъи). The modern form (ы) first occurred in South Slavic manuscripts following the loss of palatalization of word-final and preconsonantal consonants, so the letters (ъ) and (ь) became confused; since the end of the 14th century, (ы) came to be used in East Slavic manuscripts.
While vowel letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may be divided into iotated and non-iotated pairs (for example, (о) and (ё) both represent pronounced as //o//, the latter denoting a preceding palatalised consonant), (ы) is more complicated. It appears only after hard consonants, its phonetic value differs from (и), and there is some scholarly disagreement as to whether or not (ы) and (и) denote different phonemes.
There are no native Russian words that begin with (ы) (except for the specific verb Russian: ыкать: "to say the (ы)-sound"), but there are many proper and common nouns of non-Russian origin (including some geographical names in Russia) that begin with it: Kim Jong-un (Russian: Ким Чен Ын) and Eulji Mundeok (Russian: Ыльчи Мундок), a Korean military leader; and Ytyk-Kyuyol (Russian: Ытык-Кюёль), Ygyatta (Russian: Ыгыатта), a village and a river in Sakha (Yakutia) Republic respectively.
In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery is not used since the language lacks the sound pronounced as //ɨ//.[1] In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery merged with [i] and was phased out in the second half of the 19th century.[2] According to the Ukrainian academician Hryhoriy Pivtorak, the letter was replaced with so called "Cyrillic i" (и), which in Ukrainian represents the sound pronounced as /link/, which appeared by the merger of the earlier sounds [ɨ] and [i]. Ukrainian also had newly developed the sound [i] from various origins, which is represented by (i) ("Cyrillic dotted i").[1] Yery could be found in several earlier versions of the Ukrainian writing system that were introduced in the 19th century among which were "Pavlovsky writing system", "Slobda Ukraine (New) writing system", and "Yaryzhka".[3]
In Rusyn, it denotes a sound that is a bit harder pronounced as /link/ than pronounced as /[ɨ]/ and similar to the Romanian sound î, which is also written â. In some cases, the letter may occur after palatalised consonants (синьый "blue", which never happens in Russian), and it often follows (к), (г), (ґ) and (х).
The letter (ы) is also used in Cyrillic-based alphabets of several Turkic and Mongolic languages (see the list) for a darker vowel pronounced as /link/. The corresponding letter in Latin-based scripts are (ı) (dotless I), I with bowl (Ь ь), and (y) (in Turkmen).[4]
In Tuvan, the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.[5] [6]