Only in Modern Greek, which underwent a vowel-shift amazingly similar to that in English. Classic Greek eta was a é sound as in matinee and soiree.
Off to GQ.
[insert your own South Park joke here]
Is yat’* that odd-looking letter resembling a lower-case b with the upright crossed and a caret sitting atop the mess? And what in the world was it ever used for?
(If you care to sort out the differences between old and new Russian alphabets and their differences from Serbian, Bulgarian, and the other Cyrillic alphabets, I’d also be grateful – I have almost no understanding of the differences, only that they do exist.)
What’s a thread on writing doing without a link to the Omniglot?
Polycarp: Cyril? Don’t you mean Kliment?
Yes. Nobody is quite sure what sound it originally stood for, though it was possibly something like the “a” in “bad”. It developed differently in each Slavic language, variously becoming “e”, “ye”, “i”, “a”, or “ja”.
Russian maintained the distinction until a few hundred years ago, but it’s since merged with E. есть meaning “to eat”, and есть meaning “to be” were at one time pronounced differently, and the former was written with a yat’, but they’re now pronounced the same (except in some very very rural Russian dialects), and since the letter became superfluous it was dropped by the Soviets.
For a comparison of the different Cyrillic alphabets, Wikipedia actually has a pretty good article. The previously-linked Omniglot page shows the Cyrillic alphabet at its various stages of reform.
Briefly, under Peter the Great, most of the superfluous Greek letters were dropped, and the yuses fell out of use. Under the Soviets, ъ, which was previously written at the end of almost every word, was dropped except for a few cases. Izhitsa, which looked like a Latin “v” and could be pronounced as “i” or “v” was dropped, as were yat’, the Latin-looking I, and fita. Church Slavonic is still written with the old old orthography (pre-Peter the Great), however, and is an absolute mess to read. There’s multiple ligatures and duplicate letters, and almost every word of importance is abbreviated (so reading it is like reading English “Our Ftr, who art in Hvn, Hlwd be Thy Nm”). But modern Russian writing has been cleared of almost all historical cruft and is one of the more logical and elegant writing systems around.
The Russian alphabet is pretty much the base Cyrillic alphabet used these days. Other Slavic languages’ alphabets differ from it by either modifying letters slightly to indicate different sounds (like Ukrainian having a Г with a little tick on the side to show a “g” sound, as Г without the tick is pronounced like “h”), or having imported modified Latin letters, such as Serbian “j” and the “Tj” and “Dj” letters (can’t type them on this computer).