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Yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel. Today it is not certain how it was pronounced: according to some modern reconstructions, it may have been [ae:] or dipthongal [ie:]. It is significant that from the earliest texts, there is considerable confusion between the yat and the iotified a (Cyrillic iа). The confusion was possibly aggravated by the fact that in the Glagolitic alphabet yat ( ) looks very similar to Cyrillic Little Yus (Ѧ).
Whichever the sound was, it gradually vanished from the Slavic languages, which meant that, while learning to write, children had to memorise mechanically where to write yat and where not. Thus, the letter was dropped in various orthography reforms: in Serbian with the reform of Vuk Karadžic , which was later used for MacedonianThe Macedonian language Makedonski is a language in the Eastern group of South Slavic languages. It is spoken by two million people, primarily in the Republic of Macedonia, the Macedonian Slavs. The Macedonian language is closely related to the Bulgarian, in Russian, BelarusianBelarusian is the language of the Belarusian nation. It is one of the three East Slavic languages and is spoken in and around Belarus. It is also known as "Belarusan", "Byelorussian", "Belorussian", or "Belarusian". The word "Byelorussian" is an adjective and Ukrainian roughly with the October revolution, and in Bulgarian as late as 1945Events January January 5 The Soviet Union recognizes the new pro-Soviet government of Poland. January 7 British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge. January 12 World War II:. The letter is no longer used in the standard modern orthography of any of the Slavic languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet, although it survives in liturgical and church texts written in the Russian recension of Church Slavonic, and has since 1991 found some favour in advertising.
In various modern Slavic languages Yat has reflected into various vowels. For example, the old Slavic root běl (white) became /b'el/ in standard Russian (dialectal /b'al/, /b'ijel/ or even /b'il/ in some regions), /bil/ in Ukrainian, bjal in Bulgarian, biel/biały in Polish, and bílý in Czech.
