U+A65C CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER IOTIFIED CLOSED LITTLE YUS

U+A65C was added to Unicode in version 5.1 (2008). It belongs to the block Cyrillic Extended-B in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Uppercase Letter and is mainly used in the Cyrillic script. It is related to its lowercase variant .

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. In text U+A65C behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Upper for sentence and ALetter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Little yus (Ѧ ѧ) and big yus (Ѫ ѫ), or jus, are letters of the Cyrillic script representing two Common Slavonic nasal vowels in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Each can occur in iotified form (Ѩ ѩ, Ѭ ѭ), formed as ligatures with the letter Decimal I (І). Other yus letters are blended yus (Ꙛ ꙛ), closed little yus (Ꙙ ꙙ) and iotified closed little yus (Ꙝ ꙝ).

Phonetically, little yus represents a nasalized front vowel, possibly [ɛ̃], while big yus represents a nasalized back vowel, such as IPA [ɔ̃]. This is also suggested by the appearance of each as a 'stacked' digraph of 'Am' and 'om' respectively.

The names of the letters do not imply capitalization, as both little and big yus exist in majuscule and minuscule variants.

All modern Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet have lost the nasal vowels, making yus unnecessary.

Big yus was a part of the Bulgarian alphabet until 1945. However, by that time, in the eastern dialects the back nasal was pronounced the same way as ъ [ə]. Because the language is based mainly on them, the western pronunciations were deemed unliterary and the letter was removed.

There are some Bulgarian dialects around Thessaloniki and Kastoria in northern Greece that still preserve a nasal pronunciation: [ˈkə̃(n)de ˈɡrẽ(n)deʃ ˈmilo ˈt͡ʃẽ(n)do] ('Where are you going, dear child?').

In Russia, little yus was adapted to represent the iotated /ja/ (я) in the middle or end of a word; the modern letter я is an adaptation of its cursive form of the seventeenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708. (This is also why я in Russian often corresponds to nasalized ę in Polish; cf. Russian пять; Polish pięć.)

In Polish, which is a Slavic language written with Latin alphabet, the letter Ę ę has the phonetic value of little yus, while Ą ą has that of big yus. The iotated forms are written ię, ią, ję, ją in Polish. However, the phonemes written ę and ą are not directly descended from those represented by little and big yus, but developed after the original nasals merged in Polish and then diverged again. (Kashubian, the closest relative of Polish, uses ã instead of ę.)

Little and big yus can also be found in the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, used until about 1860. Little yus was used for /ja/ and big yus for /ɨ/.