Short I (Й й; italics: ''Й й'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...

. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И with a

breve A breve (, less often , neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (the wedge or in Czech, in S ...

. The short I represents the

palatal approximant The voiced palatal approximant, or yod, is a type of consonant used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j, and in the Americanist phonetic n ...

like the pronunciation of in ''yesterday''. Depending on the

romanization Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, a ...

system in use and the Slavic language that is under examination, it can be romanized as , , or . For more details, see

romanization of Russian The romanization of the Russian language (the transliteration of Russian text from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script), aside from its primary use for including Russian names and words in text written in a Latin alphabet, is also essenti ...

romanization of Ukrainian The romanization of Ukrainian, or Latinization of Ukrainian, is the representation of the Ukrainian language in Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, which is based on the Cyrillic script. Romanization may be ...

romanization of Belarusian Romanization or Latinization of Belarusian is any system for transliterating written Belarusian from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Standard systems for romanizing Belarusian Standard systems for romanizing Belarusian include: *BGN/PCGN roma ...

and

romanization of Bulgarian Romanization of Bulgarian is the practice of transliteration of text in Bulgarian from its conventional Cyrillic orthography into the Latin alphabet. Romanization can be used for various purposes, such as rendering of proper names and place na ...

History

Active use of (or, rather, the breve over ) began around the 15th and 16th centuries. Since the middle of the 17th century, the differentiation between and is obligatory in the Russian variant of Church Slavonic orthography (used for the Russian language as well). During the alphabet reforms of Peter I, all diacritic marks were removed from the Russian writing system, but shortly after his death, in 1735, the distinction between and was restored. was not officially considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1930s. Because was considered to be a vowel and not a consonant, it was not required to take a hard sign when it came at the end of a word in pre-reform orthography.

Usage

In Russian, it appears predominantly in diphthongs like in широкий (''shirokiy'' 'wide'), in край (''kray'' 'end', '

krai A krai or kray (; russian: край, , ''kraya'') is one of the types of federal subjects of modern Russia, and was a type of geographical administrative division in the Russian Empire and the Russian SFSR. Etymologically, the word is relat ...

'), in долей (''doley'' 'portion'), in горой (''goroy'' 'mountain'), and in буйство (''buystvo'' 'rage'). It is used in other positions only in foreign words, such as Йopк (York, not with ), including fellow Slavic words like Йовович (Yovovich). In Kazakh, the letter is used to represent a short ɪ sound (e.g. берейік (tr. (Let us) give)). The letter, much like the other 11

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

letters, will not have another Latin version and merge with Ии ( İi). In

Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...

and

Macedonian Macedonian most often refers to someone or something from or related to Macedonia. Macedonian(s) may specifically refer to: People Modern * Macedonians (ethnic group), a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group primarily associated with North Ma ...

, the Cyrillic letter Јe is used to represent the same sound. Latin-based Slavonic writing systems, such as Polish, Czech and the Latin version of Serbo-Croatian use the Latin letter J (not the letter Y, as in English or French), for that purpose.

Related letters and other similar characters

*И и : Cyrillic letter I *Ы ы : Cyrillic letter Yery *Η η : Greek letter Eta *H h : Latin letter H *І і : Cyrillic letter І *I i : Latin letter I *Ĭ ĭ : Latin letter Ĭ *J j : Latin letter J *Ј ј : Cyrillic letter Je *Y y : Latin letter Y *Ў ў : Cyrillic letter Short U * ̆ Combining

U+0306 Note that breve in Й may be quite different from ordinary breve, the former having a thinner central part and thicker ends (the opposite holds for ordinary breve). This is often seen in serif fonts, cf. Й (Cyrillic Short I) and Ŭ (Latin U with breve).

Computing codes

References

External links

* * {{Authority control I