Yi or Ji (Ї ї; italics: ''Ї ї'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

. Yi is derived from the Greek letter

iota Iota (; uppercase Ι, lowercase ι; ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Ї, ї), and J ...

with two dots. It was the initial variant of the Cyrillic letter І/і, which saw change from two dots to one in 18th century, possibly inspired by similar Latin letter i. Later two variants of the letter separated to become distinct letters in the Ukrainian alphabet. It is used in the

Ukrainian alphabet The Ukrainian alphabet () is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th ...

, the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet, and the Prešov Rusyn alphabet of Slovakia, where it represents the

iotated In Slavic languages, iotation (, ) is a form of palatalization that occurs when a consonant comes into contact with the palatal approximant from the succeeding phoneme. The is represented by iota (ι) in the early Cyrillic alphabet and the Gre ...

vowel sound , like the pronunciation of in "yeast". As the historical variant of the Cyrillic Іі it represented either /i/ (as i in ''pizza'') or /j/ (as y in ''yen''). In various romanization systems of Ukrainian, ''ї'' is represented by Latin letters ''i'' or ''yi'' (word-initially), ''yi'', ''ji'', or even '' ï''. It was formerly also used in the

Serbian Cyrillic The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (, ), also known as the Serbian script, (, ), is a standardized variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language. It originated in medieval Serbia and was significantly reformed in the 19th cen ...

alphabet in the late 1700s and early 1800s, where it represented the sound ; in this capacity, it was introduced by

Dositej Obradović Dositej Obradović ( sr-Cyrl, Доситеј Обрадовић, ; 17 February 1739 – 7 April 1811) was a Serbian writer, biographer, diarist, philosopher, pedagogue, educational reformer, linguist and the first minister of education of Se ...

but eventually replaced with the modern letter ј by

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić VUK or Vuk may refer to: *Vuk (name), South Slavic given name ** Vuk, Ban of Bosnia (), a member of the Kotromanić dynasty ** Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864), Serbian language reformer and folklorist, often referred to simply as Vuk * ''Vuk'' (film) ...

.Maretić, Tomislav. ''Gramatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika''. 1899.Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. ''Pismenica serbskoga iezika, po govoru prostoga narod’a'', 1814. In Ukrainian, the letter was introduced as part of the ''

Zhelekhivka Zhelekhivka () was Ukrainian Phonemic orthography, phonetic orthography in Western Ukraine from 1886 to 1922 (sometimes until the 1940s), created by on the basis of the Civil Script and phonetic spelling common in the Ukrainian language at that t ...

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

, in Yevhen Zhelekhivsky's Ukrainian–German dictionary (2 volumes, 1885–86).

Related letters and other similar characters

*Ӥ ӥ : Cyrillic letter I with diaeresis *Ï ï : Latin letter I with diaeresis *Ι ι : Greek letter Ι *Ј ј : Cyrillic letter J

Computing codes

References

External links

* * * * {{Cyrillic navbox Cyrillic letters Ukrainian language