Iskousogos

[Michael Mccafferty]

Someone has published on the origin of 8. I can't recall who it was,
unfortunately. It is even known what year it arrived in French
orthography. I believe it came from Russia, but that part's fuzzy.


Michael



On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, Koontz John E wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>