Palochka


The palochka or palotchka is a letter in the Cyrillic script. The letter usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lowercase text. The capital form of the palochka often looks like the capital form of the Cyrillic letter soft-dotted I, the capital form of the Latin letter I, and the lowercase form of the Latin letter L. The letter was introduced in the late 1930s.

History

In the early times of the Soviet Union, many of the non-Russian Cyrillic alphabets contained only letters found in the Russian alphabet to keep them compatible with Russian typewriters. Sounds absent from Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations. The palochka was the only exception because the numerical digit 1 was used instead of the letter. In fact, on Russian typewriters, the character looked not like the digit 1 but like the Roman numeral I with serifs. That is still common because the palochka is not present in most standard keyboard layouts or common fonts and so it cannot be easily entered or reliably displayed on many computer systems.

Usage

In the alphabets of Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Dargwa, Ingush, Lak, Lezgian, and Tabassaran, it is a modifier letter which signals the preceding consonant as an ejective or aspirated consonant; this letter has no phonetic value on its own. An exception is the Abkhaz language, which does not use the palochka for rendering aspiration.
In Adyghe, the palochka is also a glottal stop.
In Avar
In Chechen, the palochka makes a preceding voiceless stop or affricate ejective, but also represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative when it does not follow a voiceless stop or affricate. As an exception, in the digraph ⟨хӏ⟩, it produces the voiceless pharyngeal fricative.