Em carries the sound /m/, the bilabial nasal heard at the end of the English word him. In cursive it is one of the small group of Russian letters built from a single repeated element, and that element is a documented source of ambiguity in handwritten Russian.
Looks like л (El (Л л))
In cursive both letters are built from the same element, the one identical to a dotless Latin cursive ı, so the shapes themselves may not carry the difference at all. The sources give волшебник, meaning magician, and домик, meaning little house, in which the combinations лш and ми are written identically, and мщу against лицу, which become absolutely identical in cursive. Resolve such a run at the level of the whole word, using the language and the surrounding context, rather than letter by letter.
- Printed
- М м
- Name
- эм (em)
- Transliteration
- m
- IPA
- /m/
- Position
- 14 of 33
Another look-alike
Looks like и (I (И и))
И shares the same repeated cursive element with м, which is why a sequence containing both can be read in more than one way: ми in домик is written the same as лш in волшебник. Similarity among Ш, Щ, И, Л and М is listed as a recognised difficulty in reading Russian by hand, and the sources state plainly that these combinations cannot be deciphered unambiguously without knowing the language or without a broader context. Let the sense of the word decide, then check it against the rest of the document.
History
Em is the fourteenth letter of the modern Russian alphabet, and it commonly represents the bilabial nasal consonant /m/, the sound written m in the English word him. Its form is derived from the Greek letter Mu.
In handwriting the lowercase form needs particular care. Several lowercase cursive letters, namely и, л, м, ш, щ and ы, consist entirely or in part of one element that is identical to the dotless Latin cursive ı, to the cursive Greek ι, or to half of a cursive u. Because м is built from that element, certain combinations of these letters cannot be deciphered unambiguously without knowing the language or without a broader context. In волшебник, meaning magician, and домик, meaning little house, the combinations лш and ми are written identically; мщу, meaning I avenge, and лицу, the dative of лицо, become absolutely identical in cursive. Some words pose a challenge simply because of the similarity among Ш, Щ, И, Л and М in the cursive hand.
Russian cursive itself was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid or running script that served as the 14th to 17th century chancery hand of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav, and it became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script. Skoropis in turn developed out of semi-ustav in the second half of the 14th century and was the script of offices and private office work. Each scribe had his own hand and his own peculiarities, so an unclear passage is best resolved by comparing it with the parts of the same document that have already been read.
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The history of Russian cursive
1708 — present
All 37 letters
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