The Ya (letter) reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Ya (letter)

Яя   Яя
Ya (Я) is the 32nd and last letter of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. It is pronounced as /ja/ (SAMPA). In Russian language, "Я" is the personal pronoun "I".

History

Я is actually a hybrid of two historic letters. One is A iotified (IA), a ligature of І and А, similar to letters Ю or Ѥ. The other is Little Yus (or Yus small, Ѧ). Over time, phonetic distinction between IA and Ѧ was lost, so when Peter I introduced his "civil script" in 1708, the single letter Ya (Я) was substituted for both.

As mentioned above, Я is a modern invention; it is not part of the old Cyrillic alphabet and does not exist in the Glagolitic, Greek or Latin alphabets. It has no numerical value and no name other than "Ya".

In Unicode, Я shares the same codepoints with IA (A iotified). The actual glyph depends on the font.

Code positions

Character encodingCaseBinaryHexadecimalOctalDecimal
UnicodeCapital0000010000101111042F20571071
Small0000010001001111044F21171103
KOICapital11110001F1361241
Small11010001D1321209
Windows 1251Capital11011111DF337223
Small11111111FF377
255
ISO 8859-5Capital11001111CF317207
Small11101111EF357239

Its HTML entity is Я or &#x42F for capital and я or я for small letter.

Я and R

Modern Я looks just like mirrored Latin letter R, see: ЯR, but the two letters (Я and R) are completely different in both origin and pronunciation (Cyrillic R looks like Latin P). However there is a common trope in the West to replace R by Я in titles of books, movies and computer games that are set in Russia in order to add some "Яussian flavor."

An early example was the logo for Norman Jewison's film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.

Some other examples are TETЯIS comupter game and APPAЯATCHIK fanzine.

Another letter with similar fate is Cyrillic I (И), used instead of N. 



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