Yeru or Eru (Ы ы; italics: Ы ы), usually called Y in modern Russian or Yery or Ery historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the close central unrounded vowel (more rear or upper than i) after non-palatalised (hard) consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets, and after any consonant in most of Rusyn standards, where it represents the unrounded close-mid back unrounded vowel sound. The letter is usually romanised into English and most other West European languages as : Krylov (family name, ). That spelling matches Polish, which uses to represent a very similar sound. Russian is used to transliterate Polish into Cyrillic: (). However, Latin may be used for other purposes as well (such as for , or as part of digraphs, e.g. ). In most Turkic languages that use Cyrillic, represents the close back unrounded vowel /ɯ/, like in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, etc. Origin Like many other Cyrillic letters, it was originally from a ligature (which is represented in Unicode as Yeru with Back Yer), formed from Yer and Dotted I (formerly written either dotless or with two dots) or Izhe ( which formerly resembled ). In Medieval manuscripts, it is almost always found as or . The modern form first occurred in South Slavic manuscripts following the loss of palatalization of word-final and preconsonantal consonants, so the letters and became confused; since the end of the 14th century, came to be used in East Slavic manuscripts. Usage While vowel letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may be divided into iotated and non-iotated pairs (for example, and both represent , the latter denoting a preceding palatalised consonant), is more complicated. It appears only after hard consonants, its phonetic value differs from , and there is some scholarly disagreement as to whether or not and denote different phonemes. In Russian There are no native Russian words that begin with (except for the specific verb : "to say the -sound"), but there are many proper and common nouns of non-Russian origin (including some geographical names in Russia) that begin with it: Kim Jong-un () and Eulji Mundeok (), a Korean military leader; and Ytyk-Kyuyol (), Ygyatta (), a village and a river in Sakha (Yakutia) Republic respectively. In Ukrainian In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery is not used since the language lacks the sound . In the Ukrainian alphabet, yery merged with [i] and