Short I or Yot/Jot (Й й; italics: Й й or Й й; italics: Й й) (sometimes called i kratkoye, Russian: и краткое, Ukrainian: йот) or I with breve, Russian: и с бреве) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.[1] It is made of the Cyrillic letter И with a breve.
The short I represents the palatal approximant /j/, like the pronunciation of ⟨y⟩ in yesterday.
Depending on the romanization system in use and the Slavic language that is under examination, it can be romanized as ⟨y⟩, ⟨j⟩, ⟨i⟩ or ⟨ĭ⟩. For more details, see romanization of Russian, romanization of Ukrainian, romanization of Belarusian and romanization of Bulgarian.
History
editActive use of ⟨Й⟩ (or, rather, the breve over ⟨И⟩) began around the 15th and 16th centuries. Since the middle of the 17th century, the differentiation between ⟨И⟩ and ⟨Й⟩ 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 ⟨И⟩ and ⟨Й⟩ was restored.[2] ⟨Й⟩ was not officially considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1930s.
Because ⟨Й⟩ 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
edit| Language | position in alphabet | name |
|---|---|---|
| Belarusian | 11th | і нескладовае (i nieskladovaje, or "non-syllabic I") |
| Bulgarian | 10th | и кратко (i kratko or "short I") |
| Russian | 11th | и краткое (i kratkoye or "short I") |
| Ukrainian | 14th | йот /jɔt/, й /ɪj/ |
| Kazakh | 13th | қысқа й /qysqa ɪ/ (qysqa i or "short I") |
In Russian, it appears predominantly in diphthongs like /ij/ in широкий (shirokiy 'wide'), /aj/ in край (kray 'end', 'krai'), /ej/ in долей (doley 'portion'), /oj/ in горой (goroy 'mountain'), and /uj/ in буйство (buystvo 'rage').[3] It is used in other positions only in foreign words, such as Йopк (York, not with ⟨Ё⟩), 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 letters, does not have another Latin version and merges with Ии (İi).
In Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, 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), for that purpose.
Related letters and other similar characters
edit
- 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 breve 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
edit| Preview | Й | й | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHORT I | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHORT I | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 1049 | U+0419 | 1081 | U+0439 |
| UTF-8 | 208 153 | D0 99 | 208 185 | D0 B9 |
| Numeric character reference | Й | Й | й | й |
| Named character reference | Й | й | ||
| KOI8-R and KOI8-U | 234 | EA | 202 | CA |
| Code page 855 | 190 | BE | 189 | BD |
| Code page 866 | 137 | 89 | 169 | A9 |
| Windows-1251 | 201 | C9 | 233 | E9 |
| ISO-8859-5 | 185 | B9 | 217 | D9 |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 137 | 89 | 233 | E9 |
References
edit- ^ Franklin, Simon (2019-05-16). The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850. Cambridge University Press. p. 108. ISBN 978-1-108-49257-7.
- ^ Language dynamics in the early modern period. Karen Bennett, Angelo Cattaneo, Lingua Franca and Translation in the Early Modern Period (2018 : Lisbon, Portugal) "A host of tongues...": Multilingualism. New York, NY. 2022. ISBN 978-1-000-57461-6. OCLC 1287743631.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link) - ^ Zhang, Xiangning; Zhang, Ruolin (July 2018). "Evolution of Ancient Alphabet to Modern Greek, Latin and Cyrillic Alphabets and Transcription between Them". Proceedings of the 2018 4th International Conference on Economics, Social Science, Arts, Education and Management Engineering (ESSAEME 2018). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research. Atlantis Press. pp. 156–162. doi:10.2991/essaeme-18.2018.30. ISBN 978-94-6252-549-8.
