The palochka () is a letter in 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 ...

. The letter is usually caseless. It was introduced in the late 1930s as the Hindu-Arabic digit ' 1', and on Cyrillic keyboards, it is usually typeset as the

Roman numeral Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, ea ...

''. Unicode currently supports both caseless/capital palochka at U+04C0 and a rarer lower-case palochka at U+04CF. The palochka marks glottal(ized) and pharyngeal(ized) consonants.

Form

The letter looks similar to the digit 1. Its uppercase form resembles the Latin Letter I (I i) in uppercase form, while its lowercase form resembles the Latin letter L (L l) in lowercase form.

History

The Cyrillic palochka was derived directly from the Arabic letter alif ⟨⟩. The name of the letter comes from a diminutive form of the Russian word (translit. ), which means "" in English (as in, a long thin piece of wood). In the early days of the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

, many of the non-Russian Cyrillic alphabets contained only letters found in the

Russian alphabet The Russian alphabet (, or , more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ), ten vowels (, , , , , , , , , ) ...

to keep them compatible with Russian

typewriter A typewriter is a Machine, mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of Button (control), keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an i ...

s. Sounds absent from Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations. The palochka was the only exception because the numerical digit 1 was used instead of the letter. In fact, on many Russian typewriters, the character looked not like the digit 1 but like the

with serifs. That is still common because the palochka is not present in most standard keyboard layouts (and, for some of them, not even the similar-looking Cyrillic-script letter dotted i ) or common fonts and so it cannot be easily entered or reliably displayed on many computer systems. For example, even the official site of the People's Assembly of the Republic of Ingushetia uses the digit 1 instead of the palochka. Note: This citation only supports the assertion about the Assembly website using '1', not the entire preceding paragraph.

Usage

In the alphabets of Abaza, Avar, Chechen, Dargwa, Ingush, Lak, Lezgian, Tabassaran, and Tsakhur, it is a modifier letter which signals the preceding consonant as an ejective or pharyngeal consonant; §04C0 Ӏ CYRILLIC LETTER PALOCHKA: "aspiration sign in many Caucasian languages" this letter has no phonetic value on its own. In Adyghe, the palochka by itself represents a

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

(like the tt in GA button). *Example from Kabardian Adyghe dialect: , "he asked her for something" In Avar, it represents an ejective consonant. *Example from Avar: , "to speak" In Chechen, the palochka makes a preceding stop or affricate ejective if voiceless, or pharyngealized if voiced, but also represents the pharyngealized glottal plosive (like the ayn in

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, but more abrupt, usually transcribed ) when it does not follow a stop or affricate. As an exception, in the digraph ⟨хӀ⟩, it produces the voiceless glottal fricative . Ingush is similar. *Examples from Chechen: , "girl" and [], "shark" Exceptionally among the Caucasian languages, Abkhaz language, Abkhaz does not use the palochka, but instead uses a series of special letters to distinguish ejective and non-ejective (aspirated) consonants.

Computing codes

The lowercase form of the palochka was added to Unicode 5.0 in July 2006.

Notes

References