De (Cyrillic)


De is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
De commonly represents the voiced dental stop, like the pronunciation of in "door".
De is romanised using the Latin letter D.

History

The Cyrillic letter De was derived from the Greek letter Delta.
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was , meaning "good".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, De had a value of 4.

Form

The major graphic difference between De and its modern Greek equivalent lies in the two descenders below the lower corners of the Cyrillic letter. The descenders were borrowed from a Byzantine uncial shape of uppercase Delta.
De, like the Cyrillic letter El, has two typographical variants: an older variant where its top is pointed, and a modern one where it is square. Nowadays, almost all books and magazines are printed with fonts with the second variant of the letter; the first one is rather stylish and only a few popular text fonts use it.
In italic type, the lowercase form looks more like the lowercase Latin, or a numeral "6" flipped horizontally:. Southern typography may prefer a variant that looks like a lowercase Latin. Cursive lowercase De has the same two shapes, but with a different distribution: for example, the g-shaped variant is a standard for Russian schools.
The cursive form of capital De looks like Latin D as the printed version is not comfortable enough to be written quickly. The Serbian cursive form is closer to the shape of a numeral "2" ; this form is unknown in Russia.

Usage

It most often represents the voiced dental plosive. However, word-finally and before voiceless consonants, it represents a voiceless. Before a palatalizing vowel, it represents.

Related letters and other similar characters