I І

This letter stands eleventh, writes the vowel i, and carries the numeral 10 from Greek iota. It is the second of the two Cyrillic signs for i, and the Russian tradition names it the decimal i after its numeral value, against the octal i that precedes it.

Its shape is Greek iota, a single vertical stroke, and in Slavonic it usually carries two dots above it in the printed church books, which is what distinguishes it on the page from the other tall narrow letters around it. The dots are a printers convention and are not consistent in the manuscripts.

Its numeral use is heavier than its use as a sound. Ten is the base of the whole tens series, so this letter sits under a titlo in every number from ten to nineteen, and the Slavonic habit of writing the teens with the unit before the ten means it appears second rather than first in all of them.

It survived in Russian orthography until the reform of 1918, in Bulgarian until 1945, and it is still in use today in Ukrainian and Belarusian, where it writes a distinct vowel and is a working letter rather than a doublet. That is a recurring pattern in this alphabet: a letter abolished as redundant in one language can be indispensable in the language next door, because the sound systems diverged long before the orthographies did.

The Russian orthographic reform enacted in 1917 and 1918 removed four letters from the alphabet and changed the rules for a fifth. The decimal i, yat, fita and izhitsa were abolished, and the hard sign was restricted to a single function inside words, ending the practice of writing it at the end of every word that closed with a consonant.

The reform is often remembered as a Bolshevik measure, and the decrees that enforced it were. The proposals were not. They had been worked out by a commission of the Academy of Sciences and published before the revolution, and every letter removed had been argued about by philologists for decades on the ground that it marked no distinction any Russian speaker made. What changed in 1918 was not the linguistics but the willingness to impose it, and the enforcement was blunt: printing houses had the offending sorts of type physically removed, which is why some early Soviet books use an apostrophe where a hard sign should stand.

Two constituencies kept the old letters. The church continued, and continues, to print its Slavonic books in the old orthography, so the letters are not obsolete in the sense of being unreadable. And the emigre presses kept the old spelling for decades as a deliberate refusal, which turned an argument about redundant vowels into a marker of political allegiance.

Bulgaria carried out a comparable reform in 1945, and it removed a different set of letters, because the two languages had lost different distinctions.