Iskousogos

[Koontz John E]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> The Cyrillic use of the letter Y for /u/ is a graphic variant of earlier
> Greek <8> (with the top open, of course).

I suppose that makes sense.  I'd always assumed it was based on capital
upsilon, which is Y-shaped.  But probably the miniscules were in use by
the time Cyrillic was developed.  Actually, psilon is the nominative
neuter singular of psilo's 'plain, unornamented, unadorned, prosaic,
treeless, without armor', a familiar concatenation of ideas, and upsilon
and epsilon are "plain u" and "plain e."  I had thought this was in
opposition to ou and ei, but when I looked up psilon I also checked the
letter articles and it appears that epsilon is plainer than the newfangled
eta and upsilon means vocalic u as opposed to w.