U+0463 "ѣ" Cyrillic Small Letter Yat Unicode Character

U+0463 "ѣ" Cyrillic Small Letter Yat is a historic letter from the early Cyrillic alphabet, originally used in Old Church Slavonic and later in pre-reform Russian orthography to represent a distinct vowel sound that gradually merged with the sound of "е" (pronounced /ʲe/ or /e/) in most dialects. This character was a central symbol in the Russian language until the orthographic reform of 1918, which abolished the yat and replaced it with the letter "е" in almost all cases, a change that was highly controversial at the time due to its cultural and grammatical implications. Today, while largely obsolete, the yat remains an important artifact in historical linguistics, typography, and the study of Slavic languages.