How many letters are in the Russian alphabet. The number of letters in the alphabets of different peoples

S. Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya

It seems that any first grader can give a competent answer to this question: of course, the alphabetical list “from A to Z” contains exactly 33 letters. However, what is an indisputable, "alphabetical" truth, an axiom for a schoolboy, for someone who is able to recall some facts from the history of our language and try to comprehend some trends in its development, becomes just a theory that is not always confirmed by the practice of living use.

Let's start with the fact that in our first alphabet, created by Cyril and Methodius, there were much more letters - according to the manuscripts of the 11th century that have come down to us. The Cyrillic alphabet included 43 characters. For, taking the Greek alphabet as a basis, the first-teacher brothers supplemented it with new letters specifically to convey the specific sounds of Slavic speech by graphic means: for example, Zh, Sh, b, b, “yus big” and “yus small”. However, at the same time, some of the symbols of the Slavic alphabet turned out to be doublets: for example, the letters O transferred by Cyril and Methodius from the Greek alphabet conveyed different sounds of the Greek language, [O] short and [O] long, although these sounds did not differ in Slavic languages. So already at the first stage of the existence of our alphabet, redundant letters appeared in it. one

To designate the same sound "I" in the Cyrillo-Methodius alphabet, there were as many as three graphemes. This was due to the fact that initially in the Russian alphabet they had different numerical meanings: ("And octal", or "like") denoted the number 8; ("And decimal") - the number 10; ("Izhitsa") - the number 400. In addition, Izhitsa once denoted a special version of the "I" sound, close to the German "Ü". Gradually, after the Slavs began to actively use Arabic and Latin numerals, these letters began to be perceived as redundant: the letter "and octal" was most often used, it began to be used mainly before vowels and before Y (such use of this letter was legalized in 1758 Academy of Sciences), Izhitsa - only in a few borrowed Greek words (m ro, from node). Izhitsa was finally excluded from our alphabet only in 1917. However, the letter also had one more role: it served as a semantic grapheme in the words "mir" ("consent, absence of enmity") and "mir" ("universe"). For example, in the title of the novel by L.N. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" the author used an antonymous couple of words. Already after the death of Tolstoy, in 1913, during the next reprint of the novel, an unfortunate typo was made: on the first page of the first volume, "mir" was printed in the title of the work. And although in all other volumes of this edition the title was reproduced correctly, in accordance with the author's will, the typo served as a source for a very common misconception that Tolstoy mentioned the world as the universe in the novel, and not peace as the opposite of war. 2 But with the title of the poem by V.V. Mayakovsky's "War and Peace", which was conceived by the poet as a spelling antithesis to the title of Tolstoy's novel, an incident of the opposite nature occurred - after the letter was excluded from the alphabet, the meaning of the title has to be explained in the comments ...

The struggle with "extra" letters took place throughout the history of Russian spelling: some of them were excluded from the alphabet as a result of the reforms of Peter I (1708-1710) and the Russian Academy of Sciences (1735) (then symbols disappeared from the alphabet, "green" and "yusy"), the other part - during the spelling reform of 1917-1918, when our alphabet lost such letters as, .

However, the historical changes in the “alphabetical truth” were not limited only to the exclusion of symbols that became unnecessary. So, the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1735) added new letters to the alphabet - E and Y (although unofficially "and short" 3 began to be used as early as the 16th-17th centuries). Moreover, the appearance of the first was met very unfriendly. Writer A.P. Sumarokov called this letter a "freak", and M.V. Lomonosov in the "Russian Grammar" did not consider it necessary to include E in the alphabet, justifying his decision in this way:<...>can serve both in the pronoun eto, and in the interjection to her; 2) for foreign pronunciations, inventing new letters is a very unprofitable business<...>; 3) if we invent new letters for foreign pronunciations, then our alphabet will be from Chinese. Indeed, the letter E is used mainly in borrowed words (from Russian only in pronouns and interjections: this, sort of, ehma, evon, ege-ge...). However, it is she who helps us to correctly read such, for example, proper names as Euripides, Euclid, Hermitage, in which the initial [e] is not preceded by [j], but Egypt, Europe - with [e] ioted, whereas before the appearance of E in our alphabet, such a distinction was impossible.

The need to introduce the letter Y into the Slavic alphabet, however, has also been disputed by philologists more than once. So, at the end of the 17th century, the Slovenian scientist Yuri Krizhanich drew attention to the fact that the letters b and y are never used in the same positions: b is possible only after consonants, and y only after vowels. And therefore he suggested using only b and writing end, stop, sing etc. Three centuries later, Roman Yakobson agreed with Krizhanich, in his article “Excessive Letters in Russian Writing” (1962) 4 noting that if Y were replaced by L, the letter Y would also become unnecessary, since the spelling of L’ot would make it possible to read and soft sound [l] and iotized [o] ...

The letter Yo, which became the youngest of the symbols of the Russian alphabet, was officially approved on November 18, 1783 by the decision of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by Princess Ekaterina Dashkova. Before that, a digraph was introduced in 1735 to designate stressed [O] after soft consonants, and they wrote, for example, vsiô, sliôzy.

1 This is stated, for example, in the article by D. Yazykov “Remarks on some Russian letters”, where the author, outlining the history of the creation of the Slavic alphabet, remarks: “Giving full justice to the father of our letters<...>, however, it must be admitted that from the Greek alphabet he transferred to ours and such [letters. - S. D-D.], which, by themselves or in combination with others, had different reprimands, but we got the same /, /, and also those that could be composed /, /. This is what made our Slavic spelling remarkably difficult” (Flower Garden, 1809. Part 2, No. 4, p. 55-81) (For more on this, see our article “On the History of the Russian Alphabet”).

2 “In our time, with his desire to revise everything and everything, this version has even become fashionable. No, no, yes, and in the periodical press you will find statements in favor of a "deeper" understanding of Tolstoy's novel.<…>In an article devoted to the new production of Prokofiev's opera "War and Peace" at the Mariinsky Theater, the author remarks, among other things, in parentheses: newspaper”, 2000, No. 12). So it is said: “remember”!” (N.A. Eskova. Popular and entertaining philology. M .: Flinta: Science, 2004).

3 To be more precise, “and with a short one”, since this letter was composed of the letter I and a superscript, called “short”.

4 Selected writing, 1962, I.

But from the official approval of the letter Y to its replication by the printing press, twelve whole years passed - the first book with its use, “And my trinkets” by I.I. Dmitriev, was published only in 1795. But L.N. Tolstoy was less fortunate: due to the unwillingness of the printing house to bother with the production of the letter Y, the author was unable to preserve the correct spelling of the name of the hero of the novel Anna Karenina. Tolstoy called him Levin, using his own name for this, but instead the printing house took on a completely different surname - Levin. To this day, this letter occupies the position of an orphan-foster in the Russian alphabetic family.

According to the Rules of Russian Spelling and Punctuation, Yo is required for use only in the following cases:
1. When it is necessary to prevent incorrect reading and understanding of a word, for example: we learn in contrast to we learn, everything in contrast to everything; bucket as opposed to bucket; perfect (participle) as opposed to perfect (adjective), etc.
2. When it is necessary to indicate the pronunciation of a little-known word, for example: Olekma river.
3. In special texts: primers, school textbooks of the Russian language, orthoepy textbooks, etc., as well as in dictionaries to indicate the place of stress and correct pronunciation.

However, these rules are often ignored by publishers. And try to guess what exactly the creators of such headlines and names had in mind: “Everything for the home”, “Everything for the dacha”, “ We have everything for you», « Everything in the Kremlin is like 100 years ago», « Fighting bulls will be sent to heifers”, Milk “Theme” ... And here is another curiosity associated with the use of the letter Yo - one might say, a curiosity squared. In the final lines of Anna Kuznetsova’s review of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel “Sincerely Yours Shurik”, published in the Neva magazine (2004, No. 10), the following is literally written: “ The unexpectedness that miraculously penetrated this text, ideally protected from artistic infection, is hisshittingdialect. No, no, yes, and you will meet on these pages inexplicable, it is not clear how the single-dimensional typos formed: no matter how many times the Cuban is mentioned in the text, he will be characterized as “dark-skinned”. "Tears" here is written as "tears". There are also such delights as “all other obstacles”, “it’s easy to get up from the table”, pleasant warmth”... ". And the reader of the review is not only unlikely to understand the bewilderment of the critic, but he himself will remain in bewilderment: and what is strange in the fact that “ with tears” is written as “ with tears”, what “exquisite” could criticize see in “ black Cuban" or " pleasant warmth"? .. Until he opens the book itself by L. Ulitskaya (M .: Izd-vo Eksmo, 2004) and discovers that in this edition (unlike the Neva magazine) the letter Yo is consistently used and that, according to the principle of "outposts to pray to God for a fool - he will break his forehead "through Yo are printed here and such words as" with tears", "dark-skinned", "easy", "warmth" ... It only remains that, using a quote from the book of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, suitable for the topic, exclaim " Yo moyo"! 6

The misfortunes of this letter, which occupies the "seventh and, of course, sanctified position" among the "blessed number of asterisks-letters of our alphabet", allowed the authors of the book "Two centuries of the Russian letter Y. History and Dictionary" (M., 2000) B.V. Pchelov and V.T. Chumakov to call it "one of the symbols of the Russian mentality."

No wonder such a significant action was the celebration of the 220th anniversary of the letter Y, organized by the St. Petersburg Museum of the History of the City. And in Ulyanovsk, in the homeland of the famous writer and historian N.M. Karamzin, who for a long time was considered the inventor of this letter sign (although in fact he only used Yo when printing the collection "Aonides" in 1796), a monument to this letter 7 was recently erected ... And the ranks of "yofikators" - zealots consistent use of Yo. For, as one of them, Igor Sid, states, “the letter ё, this, according to the definition of the essayist Vladimir Berezin,“ the only umlaut of the Russian language ”, is disappearing more and more clearly from our lives. Meanwhile, she personifies all living things (warm, cheerful, cool, smart, funny, unlucky, light, heavy, yellow, green, solid, reliable, tearful, scabrous, curmudgeonly hot, seriously hot, scrupulously hot, etc.), which is in the language.

In an exceptional situation, even today, the creator of a work of art has to try on the role of the “father of letters”, like St. Cyril, creating, “constructing” new graphemes capable of conveying specific sounds, the need for which is due to the text itself. So, in A. Blok's poem "Autumn evening was ..." the grapheme ö appears in the word "sör" ( The guest wearily sat down on a chair by the fire, / And the dog at his feet lay down on the carpet. / The guest politely said: “Are you still not enough?/ It's time to humble yourself before the Genius of Fate, sör"), which sounded in the poet's "Turgenev sound,<…>with a French touch, in the old nobility way. 8 "Turgenev" this sound is called by the poet because the grapheme ö is used in the novel by I.S. Turgenev "Spring Waters" to convey the features of the speech of one of the characters (" his comrade again stopped him, saying: "Döngoff, be quiet!""). About what is now an alphabetic sign ö has already outgrown the framework of an occasional artistic symbol and has actually become an equal member of the modern Russian alphabet, as evidenced by its use, for example, on the posters of the music festival " Ölimusic” (a transcription of the English language “Earlymusik”), first held in April 2002. The creators of this term, with such a spelling, wanted to emphasize not only the novelty of the musical phenomenon itself (“the concept of “old music” smells of mothballs, and the organizers of the festival are guided by the youth” 9), but also its own Russian origin.

So, as a result of the reform of 1917-1918. as part of our alphabet, 33 letters were permanently registered, and until recently, old graphemes could only be seen on a few monuments of the pre-October period that escaped destruction.

5 So (“not”) in the text of the review, although in accordance with the spelling norm, the amplifying particle “neither” should have been used here. Well, let's take this as "an inexplicable, incomprehensible typo" ...

6 Ludmila Petrushevskaya. Wild animal stories. M., Eksmo, 2003. S. 40.

7 The creation of this monument marked the beginning of a number of similar events: for example, in 2003 in Polotsk it was decided to perpetuate the letter “u is short”, which exists only in the Belarusian alphabet, and in 2004 a monument to the letter Y was erected in Yekaterinburg. The spirit of the times is an attempt to express the inner through the outer, the content through the form, the spirit through the letter ...

8 Roots Chukovsky. Alexander Blok as a person and a poet. Pg., 1924.

9 Petersburg on Nevsky. 2003, no. 11.

The alphabet of the Russian language has a long history. And although this is a well-known truth, few people know who and when invented it.

Where did the Russian alphabet come from

The history of the Russian alphabet plunges into deep antiquity, during the times of pagan Kievan Rus.

The command to create the Russian alphabet came from Emperor Michael III of Byzantium, who instructed the monk brothers to develop the letters of the Russian alphabet, later called Cyrillic. This happened in 863.

The Cyrillic alphabet went back to the Greek script, but since Cyril and Methodius came from Bulgaria, this land becomes the center for the spread of literacy and writing. Church Greek and Latin books began to be translated into Old Church Slavonic. After several centuries, it became exclusively the language of the church, but played an important role in the development of the modern Russian language. Many consonants and vowels have not survived to this day, since this Russian alphabet has undergone many changes. The main transformations affected the alphabet during the time of Peter the Great and during the October Revolution.

How many letters are in the alphabet?

However, it is interesting not only who invented the Russian alphabet, but also how many letters it contains. Most people, even in adulthood, doubt how many there are: 32 or 33. And what can we say about children! There is every reason for this. Let's dive into history.

There were 43 letters in the Old Slavonic alphabet (in the form in which it has come down to us in written sources). Subsequently, 4 more letters were added, and 14 were removed, since the sounds they denoted ceased to be pronounced or merged with similar ones. In the 19th century, the Russian historian and writer N. Karamzin introduced the letter "yo" into the alphabet.

For a long time, "E" and "Yo" were considered one letter, so it was customary to think that there were 32 letters in the alphabet.

Only after 1942 they were separated, and the alphabet became 33 letters.

The alphabet of the Russian language in its current form is divided into vowels and consonants.

We pronounce vowels freely: the sound passes through the vocal cords without obstacles.
Consonant sounds for their creation require obstacles on the way. In modern Russian, these letters and sounds are in the following ratio, while the number of sounds and letters will be different:

• - sounds: vowels - 6, consonants - 37;
• - letters: vowels - 10, consonants - 21.

If you do not go into details and say briefly, this is due to the fact that some vowels (e, e, u, i) can mean two sounds, and consonants have pairs of hardness-softness.

By spelling, uppercase and lowercase letters are distinguished:

Their writing is associated with the need to highlight proper and common nouns in the text (capitals are used for the latter, as well as for writing words in general).

Learning the order of letters

Even if your child knows what the letters are called, closer to school age, the problem arises that you need to memorize the letters in order in the alphabet. Most children confuse letters for a long time and cannot put them in the right order. Although helping a child is very simple. There are several ways to do this.

Photos and pictures for babies

Pictures and photos with letters can help you learn the alphabet. You can download them on our website, print, stick on thick cardboard and engage with your child.

What can be useful pictures and photos attached to the designations of letters?

Beautiful design, bright colors will surely attract the attention of kids. Children are interested in everything unusual, colorful - and learning goes faster and more exciting. The Russian alphabet and pictures will become best friends in the lessons for kids.

Russian alphabet in pictures for children.
Table with cards of the Russian alphabet.

Another option is a table of letters with numbers, numbers

It is also easy to download and print it on the site. A numbered list of letters for children can make it much easier for those who can count to learn the order of the alphabet. So the guys remember firmly how many letters are in the alphabet, and the accompanying photos and pictures that the table includes help build an associative array. So someone came up with a great idea - to learn the alphabet with pictures and photos.

Russian alphabet with letter numbering.

Educational cartoons

No one will argue with the fact that all children love cartoons. But after all, this love can be put to good use and learn the alphabet with the help of specially created educational cartoons. They include excerpts from Soviet cartoons, bright designations of letters, pictures, songs. Musical accompaniment makes children hum and rhyme the alphabet, and this way it is remembered much faster.

— "Alphabet in cartoons"

You can watch this cartoon here:

This is a great video tutorial for kids. There is not only writing and reading letters, but also excerpts from cartoons, images of what words mean for a particular letter, etc. The kid will have no choice but to memorize the song and the order of the letters.

- "Learning letters: the alphabet in verse"

You can watch this cartoon here:

In addition to colorful cartoons, melodic musical accompaniment, the cartoon "Learning letters: the alphabet in verse" offers simple verses that are easy to remember and tell the kid which letter in the alphabet is next.

- "ABC for kids" studio Berg Sound

This is a great cartoon for those children who are already familiar with the alphabet and are trying to read. Here we learn the alphabet and the rules for writing words with the Computer and its assistant File. They tell the kids, using the example of words, how to read, and what place the letters occupy in the alphabet, as well as how many letters are in the Russian alphabet. This is a fascinating cartoon designed for 30-40 minutes, so you have to be patient. But for children, it will not be needed: the material is presented in a playful way, and the children do not get bored.

You can see the cartoon here

- "Learning letters with the cat Busya"

You can download the cartoon here

The main character is the cat Busya, who came out of the illustrated primer to show the children how the letters look and read. The cartoon has not only colorful drawings, but also musical accompaniment. Cat Busya reads short poems dedicated to a single letter.

- "Learning the Russian alphabet"

It will be easy to watch this cartoon here

It is a viewing of an illustrated primer, and a male voice pleasantly and slowly reads small poems dedicated to letters.

Thus, learning the alphabet should be interesting for children, then they will quickly and easily master the material. Learning in a fun and non-intrusive way

We use letters in writing and sounds in speech. Letters represent the sounds we make. There is no simple and direct correspondence between letters and sounds: there are letters that do not designate sounds, there are cases when a letter means two sounds, and cases when several letters mean one sound. Modern Russian has 33 letters and 42 sounds.

Kinds

Letters are vowels and consonants. The letters soft sign and hard sign do not form sounds; there are no words in Russian that begin with these letters. The Russian language is “vociferous”, in Russian words there are many vowels (o, e, i, a), voiced consonants (n, l, v, m, p). Noisy, deaf, hissing (w, h, w, u, c, f) are much less. The vowels yu, e, e are also rarely used. In a letter, instead of the letter ё, they often write the letter e without losing the meaning.

Alphabet

The letters of the Russian language are listed below in alphabetical order. Uppercase and lowercase letters are shown, their names are indicated. Vowels are marked in red, consonants in blue, letters ь, ъ in gray.

A a B b C c D d E f f f g f f g h i i y y k k l l M m N n o P p p r s s t u u v f x x z z z h Sh sh y y y y b

The letter L is called "el" or "el", the letter E is sometimes called "E reverse".

Numbering

Numbers of letters of the Russian alphabet in direct and reverse order:

Letter	BUT	B	AT	G	D	E	Yo	F	W	And	Y	To	L	M	H	O	P	R	With	T	At	F	X	C	H	W	SCH	Kommersant	S	b	E	YU	I
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33
	33	32	31	30	29	28	27	26	25	24	23	22	21	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1

An alphabet is a collection of letters or other characters used to write in a particular language. There are many different alphabets, each with its own characteristics and history.

In this case, we will talk about the Russian alphabet. Over the course of several centuries of existence, it developed and underwent changes.

History of the Russian alphabet

In the 9th century, thanks to the monks Cyril and Methodius, the Cyrillic alphabet appeared. From that moment, Slavic writing began to develop rapidly. It happened in Bulgaria. It was there that there were workshops where liturgical books were copied and also translated from Greek.

A century later, the Old Church Slavonic language comes to Russia, church services are conducted in it. Gradually, under the influence of the Old Russian language, Old Slavonic undergoes some changes.

Sometimes an equal sign is put between the Old Slavonic and Old Russian languages, which is completely wrong. These are two different languages. However, the alphabet originated, of course, from Old Slavonic.

At first, the Old Russian alphabet consisted of 43 letters. But the signs of one language cannot be accepted by another language without amendments, because the letters must somehow correspond to the pronunciation. How many Old Church Slavonic letters were removed from, how many and what kind of letters were destined to appear, this is the subject of a separate article. We can only say that the changes were significant.

Over the following centuries, the alphabet continued to adapt to the requirements of the Russian language. Letters that were not in use were abolished. A significant reform of the language took place under Peter I.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian alphabet had 35 letters. At the same time, "E" and "Yo" were considered one letter, just like "I" and "Y". But the alphabet contained letters that disappeared after 1918.

Most of the letters of the alphabet until the beginning of the 20th century had names different from modern ones. If the beginning of the alphabet is familiar (“az, beeches, lead”), then the continuation may seem unusual: “verb, good, eat, live ...”

To date, the alphabet consists of 33 letters, of which 10 are vowels, 21 and two letters that do not represent sounds (“b” and “b”).

The fate of some letters of the Russian alphabet

For a long time, "I" and "Y" were considered variants of the same letter. Peter I, reforming, canceled the letter "Y". But after a while she again took her place in writing, since many words are unthinkable without her. However, the independent letter "Y" (and short) became only since 1918. Moreover, "Y" is a consonant letter, while "I" is a vowel.

The fate of the letter "Yo" is also interesting. In 1783, the director of the Academy of Sciences, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, proposed introducing this letter into the alphabet. This initiative was supported by the Russian writer and historian N. M. Karamzin. However, the letter was not widely used. "Yo" settled in the Russian alphabet by the middle of the 20th century, but its use in print media continues to be unsteady: either "Yo" is required to be used, or it is categorically not accepted.

The use of the letter "Yo" vaguely resembles the fate of the Izhitsa "V", the letter that once completed the alphabet. It was practically not used, because. was replaced by other letters, but continued to proudly exist in some words.

The next letter worthy of special mention is "Ъ" - a solid sign. Before the reform of 1918, this letter was called "er" and was used in writing much more often than now. Namely, it was necessarily written at the end of words ending in a consonant. The abolition of the rule to end the word with "er" led to great savings in the publishing business, since the amount of paper for books was immediately reduced. But the solid sign remained in the alphabet; it performs a very necessary function when it stands inside a word.

Emperor Michael III streamlined the script for the Slavic language. After the appearance of the Cyrillic alphabet, which goes back to the Greek statutory (solemn) letter, the activity of the Bulgarian school of scribes develops (after Cyril and Methodius). Bulgaria becomes the center for the dissemination of Slavic writing. Here the first Slavic book school is being created - Preslav book school, in which the Cyrillic and Methodius originals of liturgical books (Gospel, Psalter, Apostle, church services) are copied, new Slavic translations from Greek are made, original works in Old Slavonic appear (“On the writings of Chrnorizets the Brave”). Later, Old Church Slavonic penetrates into Serbia, and at the end of the 10th century becomes the language of the church in Kievan Rus.

Old Church Slavonic, being the language of the church, was influenced by the Old Russian language. It was an Old Church Slavonic language with elements of living East Slavic speech. Thus, the modern Russian alphabet originated from the Cyrillic alphabet of the Old Slavonic language, which was borrowed from the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet and became widespread in Kievan Rus.

Later, 4 new letters were added, and 14 old ones were excluded at different times as unnecessary, since the corresponding sounds disappeared. The iotized yus (Ѩ, Ѭ) disappeared first of all, then the big yus (Ѫ), which returned in the 15th century, but disappeared again at the beginning of the 17th century [ ], and iotized E (Ѥ); the rest of the letters, sometimes slightly changing their meaning and form, have survived to this day as part of the alphabet of the Church Slavonic language, which for a long time was mistakenly considered identical with the Russian alphabet. Spelling reforms of the second half of the 17th century (associated with the “correction of books” under Patriarch Nikon) fixed the following set of letters: A, B, C, D, D, E (with a spellingly different version of Є, which was sometimes considered a separate letter and was put in the alphabet on place of the current E, that is, after Ѣ), Zh, S, Z, I (with a spellingly different version of Y for the sound [j], which was not considered a separate letter), I, K, L, M, N, O (in two orthographically different styles: “narrow” and “wide”), П, Р, С, Т, У (in two orthographically different styles: ), Ф, Х, Ѡ (in two orthographically different styles: “narrow” and “wide” , and also as part of the ligature "from" (Ѿ), usually considered a separate letter), C, H, W, SC, b, Y, b, Ѣ, Yu, I (in two styles: Ꙗ and Ѧ, which were sometimes considered different letters, sometimes not), Ѯ, Ѱ, Ѳ, V. Sometimes the alphabet also included a big yus (Ѫ) and the so-called "ik" (in the form of the current letter "y"), although they had no sound meaning and were not used in any word.

In this form, the Russian alphabet remained until the reforms of Peter I in 1708-1711 (and the Church Slavonic is still the same), when superscripts were abolished (which, incidentally, “cancelled” the letter Y) and many doublet letters were abolished,