The dotted i, also called decimal і, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in English "machine". It is used in the orthographies of Belarusian, Kazakh, Khakas, Komi, Carpathian Rusyn and Ukrainian and quite often, but not always, is the equivalent of the Cyrillic letter i as used in Russian and other languages. In Ukrainian І is the twelfth letter of the alphabet and represents the sound in writing. Ukrainian uses и to represent the sound . In Belarusian I is the tenth letter of the alphabet. It represents . The two Carpathian Rusyn standard varieties use і, и and ы for three different sounds:, and, respectively. In Komi, і occurs only after the consonants д, з, л, н, с, and т and does not palatalize them while и does. In Kazakh and Khakas, і represents, as in "bit". In Kazakh, the letter occurs on most native Turkic words. Most of the loanwords use и. Just like the Latin letters I/i, the dot above the letter appears only in its lowercase form and then only if that letter is not combined with a diacritic above it. Even when the lowercase form is present without any other diacritic, the dot is not always rendered in historic texts. Some modern texts and font styles, except forcursive styles, still discard the "soft" dot on the lowercase letter because the text is readable without it. The letter was also used in Russian before 1918.
History
The Cyrillic soft-dotted letter i was derived from the Greek letter iota. The name of this letter in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was , meaning "and". In the Cyrillic numeral system, soft-dotted І had a value of 10. In the early Cyrillic alphabet, there was little or no distinction between the Cyrillic letter i, derived from the Greek letter eta, and the soft-dotted letter i. They both remained in the alphabetical repertoire since they represented different numbers in the Cyrillic numeral system, eight and ten, respectively. They are, therefore, sometimes referred to as octal I and decimal I.
⟨і⟩ was used before all vowels and before the semivowel ⟨й⟩ except at the end of a morpheme in a compound word, where ⟨и⟩ was used: пяти + акровый = пятиакровый ;
⟨и⟩ was used as the last letter of a word and before consonants except in for "world, universe, local community, commons, society, laity" and words derived from it.
As it turns out, the spelling of the two variants of мир was an artificial distinction to separate two different definitions of what was originally in fact the same word.
