Short I

Cyrillic letter Short I
Phonetic usage:	[j]
The Cyrillic script
Slavic letters
Non-Slavic letters
Archaic letters
	List of Cyrillic letters; Cyrillic digraphs;

Short I or Yot (Й й; italics: Й й) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И with a breve.

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⟩ (the most common), ⟨j⟩, ⟨i⟩ or ⟨ĭ⟩ (probably the least common).

For more details, see romanization of Russian, romanization of Ukrainian and romanization of Bulgarian.

History

Active use of ⟨Й⟩ (or, rather, the breve over ⟨И⟩) began around the 15th and the 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. ⟨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

Language	position in alphabet	name
Belarusian	11th	і нескладовае (I neskladovaye, 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/

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'). 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 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 Serbian and Croatian use the Latin letter J (not the letter Y, as in English or French), for that purpose.

Related letters and other similar characters

Contrastive use of Cyrillic kratka (for consonant [j]) and Latin breve (for short vowel [ĭ]) above и in Russian-Nenets dictionary

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

Character information
Preview	Й		й
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHORT I		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHORT I
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	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	&Jcy;		&jcy;
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

gollark: No, but you can use accursed streaming base conversion algorithms™ probably.

gollark: I had a paper on generating digits of things like that using a generalized base conversion algorithm on infinite lazy streams, 'twas very weird.

gollark: The Wikipedia article explains how you can attain things from that.

gollark: Xylophone Yttrium Zoo, India.

gollark: Either by starting at the *maximum* length for everything and seeing where it can be shifted to be smaller, or starting at a more optimistic one and trying to make it actually work

External links

The dictionary definition of Й at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of й at Wiktionary

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