Short I

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Heading=Cyrillic letter Short I


uuc=0419|ulc=0439 Short I (Й, й) is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И (which resembles a reversed Latin capital N), with a breve.

It is the eleventh letter in the Russian alphabet, and in Russian is called И краткое ("I kratkoye" or "short I").

It is the tenth letter in the Bulgarian alphabet and is called И кратко ("I kratko" or "short I") in Bulgarian.It is the fourteenth letter in the Ukrainian alphabet, and in Ukrainian is called Йот, ("Yot") or Ий ("Yi", pronounced IPA| [ɪj] ).It is also the eleventh letter of the Belarusian alphabet, however the letter И is not used in Belarusian.

Short I represents the semivowel IPA|/j/ as in English toy, but appears predominantly in the form of diphthongs like IPA|/ij/ in широкий (wide), IPA|/aj/ in край (end, krai), IPA|/ej/ in долей (portion), IPA|/oj/ in горой (mountain), and IPA|/uj/ in буйство (violence). It is transliterated as "j, y," or "i" depending on which romanization system is used. See Transliteration of Russian into English and Romanization of Ukrainian. It is used in other positions only in foreign words, such as Йopк (York) or even fellow Slavic words like Йoвoвич.

Active use of the letter Й (or, rather, the breve over И) began in the 15-16th centuries. Since the middle of the 17th century, the differentiation between И and Й has become obligatory in the Russian variant of Church-Slavonic orthography (used for the Russian language as well). During the alphabet reforms of Peter I, all diacritical marks were removed from the Russian writing system, but shortly after his death (1735) the distinction between И and Й was restored. Й was not officially considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1930s.

In Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, the letter Ј is used to represent the same sound. Latin-based Slavonic writing systems such as Polish, Czech and the Latin version of Serbo-Croatian also use the letter J for that purpose.

Code positions

Its HTML entities are: Й or Й for capital and й or й for lowercase.

ee also

*И, и - I (Cyrillic)
*Ј, ј - Je (Cyrillic)
*Ў