Yery

The letter Yery in several fonts

Like many other Cyrillic letters, it was originally from a ligature ꙑ (which is represented in Unicode as Yeru with Back Yer), formed from Yer ⟨ъ⟩ and ⟨і⟩ (formerly written either dotless or with two dots) or Izhe (⟨и⟩ which formerly resembled ⟨н⟩). In mediaeval manuscripts, it is almost always found as ⟨ъі⟩ or ⟨ъи⟩. Once the letters ⟨ъ⟩ and ⟨ь⟩ later lost their values as vowels in the Slavic languages, the current simplified form ⟨ы⟩ evolved.

The soft sign (Ь) has the same trill. Because of phonological processes, the actual realisation of /i/ after alveolar consonants (⟨д⟩, ⟨з⟩, ⟨л⟩, ⟨н⟩, ⟨р⟩, ⟨с⟩, ⟨т⟩, or ⟨ц⟩) is retracted to a close central unrounded vowel [ɨ], or [ʷɨ] after the labials: ⟨б⟩, ⟨в⟩, ⟨м⟩, ⟨п⟩.

In Rusyn, it denotes a sound a bit harder than [ɨ] and close to the Romanian sound î, also written â. In some situations, it may occur after palatalised consonants (синьый "blue", which never happens in Russian), and it often follows ⟨к⟩, ⟨г⟩, ⟨ґ⟩ and ⟨х⟩.

While vowel letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may be divided into iotated and non-iotated pairs (for example, ⟨а⟩ and ⟨я⟩ both represent /a/, 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.

Native Russian words do not begin with ⟨ы⟩ (except for the specific verb ыкать: "to say the ⟨ы⟩-sound"), but there are many proper and common nouns of non-Russian origin (including some geographical names in Russia) beginning with it: Kim Jong-un (Ким Чен Ын) and Eulji Mundeok (Ыльчи Мундок), a Korean military leader; and Ytyk-Kyuyol (Ытык-Кюёль), Ygyatta (Ыгыатта), a village and a river in Sakha (Yakutia) Republic respectively.

In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery is not used as the language lacks the sound /ɨ/.[1] In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery was mixed with [i] and was phased out in the second half of the 19th century.[2] According to Ukrainian academician Hryhoriy Pivtorak, the letter was replaced with so called "Cyrillic i" ⟨и⟩ which in Ukrainian language pronounced as [ɪ] and appeared due to the merger of letters ⟨ы⟩ and ⟨i⟩ ("Cyrillic dotted i").[1] The yery letter could be found in several earlier versions of Ukrainian writing system that were introduced in the 19th century among which are "Pavlovsky writing system", "Slobda Ukraine (New) writing system", "Yaryzhka", and others.[3]

The letter ⟨ы⟩ is also used in Cyrillic-based alphabets of several Turkic and Mongolic languages (see the list) for a darker vowel [ɯ]. The corresponding letter in Latin-based scripts are ⟨ı⟩ (dotless I), I with bowl, and the soft sign (Ь ь)

In Tuvan, the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.[4][5]

• Ь ь : Cyrillic letter Soft sign
• И и : Cyrillic letter I
• Ъ ъ : Cyrillic letter Yer
• I ı : Latin letter Dotless I
• Ư ư : Latin letter U with horn, the 26th letter of the Vietnamese alphabet.

• Russian: An interactive online reference grammar, by Dr Robert Beard

• The dictionary definition of Ы at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of ы at Wiktionary