U+0462 "Ѣ" Cyrillic Capital Letter Yat Unicode Character

U+0462 "Ѣ" Cyrillic Capital Letter Yat is a historical letter in the early Cyrillic alphabet, originally used in Old Church Slavonic and later in pre-reform Russian, Bulgarian, and other Slavic languages. It represented a distinct vowel sound that varied by language and time period, often a long "ē" or "ie" in Old Church Slavonic, and by the 19th century in Russian it had largely merged in pronunciation with "Е" (Ye) while retaining its distinct spelling in written form. This letter was a key target of the 1918 Russian orthography reform, which officially abolished "Ѣ" from the alphabet, along with other changes, to simplify spelling and reduce illiteracy. Today, it appears primarily in historical, linguistic, or religious texts, and sometimes in ironic or nostalgic modern use.