Talk:Dotted I (Cyrillic)

Name of the letter

I think this article must be renamed. It's not Ukrainian i. It's just a kind of Cyrillic i that was used in three languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusan) and now is used in two of them (Belarusan and Ukrainian). There's absolutely no sense in calling it Ukrainian. --rydel 18:10, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Good point, but can you think of a better name? Unicode calls it "Byelorussian-Ukrainian I" or "Old Cyrillic I". Early Cyrillic I also redirects here. I think it would be okay to use two names in different contexts, but of course only one can be the main heading. How about a name descriptive of the glyph, like "Simple I (Cyrillic)", "Simplified I (Cyrillic)" or "Vertical I (Cyrillic)"?

Anyone know more about the historic development of И and І? There's some insight in Berdnikov & Lapko, Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode, pp. 6–7 (PDF). И and І used to be called Izhe, and Izhei or I, but these aren't used in the modern context.

Also note that in early Cyrillic, the letter could be formed with none, one, or two dots, but I don't know the significance or when the variations were used. They may have been considered diacritics or ornament, and not part of the letter. (see also Yi (Cyrillic), although I think that Ukrainian letter is an innovation of the 1870s.)

This was mentioned briefly in a discussion at Talk:Ge (Cyrillic). I'm also mildly uncomfortable with the odd naming of Ge (Cyrillic) and Ghe. —Michael Z. 2005-02-20 20:54 Z

I would give it "Decimal I (Cyrillic)" as the main name. As far as I can tell you, this name is the most common way to refer to this letter in modern Russian (say, in public academic discourse). For example, see the Google results for "и десятеричное" (Russian `i decimal'): there are quite a few uses, the first entries coming from an encyclopedia.
I would even do the renaming/redirecting work in Wikipedia myself, but I'm not experienced enough for this.--Imz 18:43, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I totally agree. It is fine calling Є 'Ukrainian Ye', as Ukrainian is the only language that uses it, but I is used in Ukrainian, Belarusian, Church Slavonic as well as pre-1917 Russian (and I think it may be used by some central Asian languages that use Cyrillic). I think "Ukrainian-Belorusian I" would possibly suffice as the title though.

Hryts 12:36, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually the name currently chosen now is even worse than the original (the precision found in the Unicode name allows to make a distinction, but did not mean that the letter is restricted to these two languages; this is true even for all other letters designated with a "Ukrainian" precision, because there also exists is some Transcaucasian languages written with these "Ukrainian" letters) !

That Cyrillic I/i is definitely not dotted, but instead soft-dotted (like its Latin counterpart, outside of its usage in Turkic languages, where it is either strongly dotted, or strongly not dotted; this is also a reason why long, the Turkic languages written in the Cyrillic script do not use this Ukrainian/Belarussian/Old Russian variant, but the modern Russian variant that looks like a mirrored N). The soft dot disappears when the letter is used with a combining diacritic (notably the macron, as well as the diaeresis used for the Ukrainian yi letter which as a canonical decomposition to this Cyrillic soft-dotted I/i and the combining diaeresis !)

Note also that in the Cyrillic script, as well as in the Latin script from which this soft-dotted I/i letter was borrowed, it was initially not dotted at all. The dot started to be added only to make texts more easily readable with some cursive styles, but otherwise this dot played no semantic or phonetic role. So it is completely false to designate this letter as a "dotted i"

The only real "dotted i" is the one that is used in Turkic alphabets (used in the same turcomongolian languages of the Causase for which the Cyrillic "patlotchka" was letter created, and this is not just a coincidence ! See below).

For this reason, the article should better be named "Soft-dotted i (Cyrillic)" rather than "Dotted I (Cyrillic)" (and article naming conventions in Wikipedia should not use a capital I because this is not the first letter of the article name and not a proper name).

Important note : do not confuse this soft-dotted letter I/i also with the palotchka used in many Cyrillic alphabets (which looks like a Latin capital I, and as a Latin small l when lowercased, i.e. the palotchka is never dotted by itself like this soft-dotted I/i).

Most Caucasian languages (not all) need and use the palotchka letter (usually written in its capital form; formally this palotchka is cased, but this does not make any difference with sans-serif and cursive font styles, the difference being visible only in non-cursive serif fonts), and so they avoid to use the Cyrillic soft-dotted I/i.

Russian itself (as well as Ukrainian) normally does not need a palotchka, as it is only found in precombined forms for a few distinctive letters: this explains why this soft-dotted i has been used for long in Russian (until the Cyrillic script started to be extended to cover many more Caucasian languages; migrations in the Russian empire required to preserve distinctions for people names, then for many borrowed words, and then to force those languages to adopt the Cyrillic script, until those new letters were integrated in Russian itself; additionally, the orthodox religion and nationalism played a role to deprecate the former soft-dotted I/i inherited from Latin in Russia; this Russian evolution of the Cyrillic letter I/i did not occur for Ukrainian, due to its much larger speaking population that could resist the dominant Russian culture, and where it did not need the separate palotchka).

The palotchka has been promoted as a plain letter in Caucasian languages due to their high number of phonemes that can be iotacized. For most other languages written in the Cyrillic scripts, the few iotacized letters are noted with a combining diacritic (such as the diaeresis or acute accent; but there's at least one language, Chukchi, that uses now a non-combining apostrophe-quote), or sometimes with the soft-dotted letter J/j (borrowed from the Latin script), or most often with an unbreakable "palotchka-like" or some hook glyph part, within a specific ligature that cannot be separated from its base (with which it forms a plain distinctive letter of the alphabet of those languages).

It is interesting to note that this palotchka resurrects the initial unified letter form of the historic Latin "capital" letter I (where case distinctions still did not exist), which itself was borrowed from the Greek letter iota (which has never been dotted at all, even today). It helps reunifying the various ways to note the iotacization, which is completely inconsistant today in many Cyrillic alphabets (where diacritics play different role depending on the base letter to which they are applied, and that also have adopted various combining or ligatured forms). In fact, it is a return to the Greek roots of the Cyrillic alphabet.

verdy_p (talk) 22:43, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

1. The palotchka and this I were never used together in a single orthography.

2. The current Belarusian official orthography rules [1] state that the letter І/і is soft-dotted in print, but in handwriting it should be dotted.

3. "The orthodox religion and nationalism played a role to deprecate the former soft-dotted I/i inherited from Latin in Russia" — wrong, the orthography reform was devised by linguists, not by nationalists. Its aim was simplifying orthography, not anything else. In Russian, the letters И/и and І/і had identical sound, in Ukrainian, their sounds are different. Burzuchius (talk) 17:09, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

World and Peace

I've heard the Ukrainian I is sometimes used to distinguish world (мир) from peace (мір), both transliterated as "mir" in English. Is this true or a wild fantasy? (Ex: http://horizon.bloghouse.net/archives/000457.html)

Just opposite system. These are Russian pre-1917/1918 rules for distinguishing и/i:

(a) write "i" before all vowels and before semivowel "й"

(b) write "и" before consonants and as the last letter of a word

(c) exception 1: write "и" before (semi)vowels in compound words (пятиакровый: пяти+акровый, five-acre)

(d) exception 2: write "и" in "миръ" for "peace, tranquility, concord, union", and "i" in "мiръ" for "world, universe, local community, commons, society, laity", with all derived words. -- Kcmamu 09:40, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was move. Cúchullain ^t/c 16:09, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Soft-dotted i (Cyrillic) → Dotted I (Cyrillic) – Revert move made without discussion by User:verdy p to a clearly OR name. No source uses this name. Relisted. Jenks24 (talk) 01:22, 30 May 2012 (UTC) 86.21.250.191 (talk) 13:26, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

• Comment it seems that "soft-dotted" is a technical term used in Unicode discussions, see http://unicode.org/review/pr-11.html (linked from http://unicode.org/review/resolved-pri.html ). Although this character does indeed have the "soft-dotted" property (as does the Spanish letter "i" among others), do we need to disambiguate it from some non-soft-dotted Cyrillic "i"? Apparently not, since the only other "i"-like characters are Ї, which is at Yi (Cyrillic), and Palochka. Note, there is no article at Soft-dotted i, so already the "(Cyrillic)" in parentheses is a problematic way to disambiguate. So, I'd be inclined to support the move back to the "Dotted i" or "Dotted I" title, but would like to hear User:verdy p first. — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 18:28, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 18 May 2014

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was no consensus. --BDD (talk) 21:43, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Dotted I (Cyrillic) → Decimal i – This letter was historically never dotted in Old Cyrillic, and often still is not, so that calling it “Dotted I” is highly misleading and often simply wrong. The original dotless form of the letter can be seen in the ligatures ы, ю, ѥ, ꙗ, ѩ, ѭ, ꙑ. “Decimal i” is, in any case, the name generally used in academic discourse by Slavists. Since “decimal i” does not require a parenthesized “(Cyrillic)” to disambiguate it, it is also a preferable title in terms of conciseness; see WP:TITLE. Also, as per WP:NCCAPS, the "i" in the title should not be capitalized. --Relisted. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 09:55, 25 May 2014 (UTC) Vorziblix (talk) 00:35, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

Discussion

Any additional comments:

• Interesting argument. However, since the article is unsourced and the nomination also provides to external evidence, it's hard to judge. —  AjaxSmack  15:05, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
• On GBooks, I can reach the following fragment [2], which is reprinted here:

  16/17 (І і). Unicode regards early Cyrillic decimal “i” as equivalent to modern Ukrainian and Belarusian dotted “i” (U+0406/U+0456). The normal glyphs for rendering the upper-case version of this item in both early and modern Cyrillic have no dot. The normal glyph for rendering the lower-case version in modern Cyrillic typography has a dot, while the normal lower-case glyph in early Cyrillic writing does not. Early Cyrillic decimal “i” with a dot should be encoded as regular decimal “i” plus a separate superscript dot character [U+0307].12

  So, decimal i is actually a common reference to the old form of the letter, and the dotted i to the modern. Unicode name is CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BYELORUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN I, which is unusable for our title. Thus, I am equally unsure. No such user (talk) 13:05, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
• The usual modern spoken Russian name for this letter is "І с точкой" = "I with a dot". Anthony Appleyard (talk) 15:25, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.