Accented Forms and Derived Letters
The vowel represented by ⟨и⟩, as well as almost any other Slavonic vowel, can be stressed or unstressed. Stressed variants are sometimes (in special texts, like dictionaries, or to prevent ambiguity) graphically marked by acute, grave, double grave, or circumflex accent marks.
Special Serbian texts also use ⟨и⟩ with a macron to represent long unstressed variant of the sound. Serbian ⟨и⟩ with a circumflex can be unstressed as well; in this case, it represent the genitive case of plural forms and is used to distinguish them from other similar forms.
Modern Church Slavonic orthography uses smooth breathing sign (Greek and Church Slavonic: psili, Latin: spiritus lenis) above the initial vowels (just for tradition, there is no difference in pronunciation). It can be combined with acute or grave accents, if necessary.
None of these above-mentioned combinations is considered as a separate letter of respective alphabet, but one of them (⟨Ѝ⟩) has an individual code position in Unicode.
⟨И⟩ with a breve forms the letter ⟨й⟩ for the consonant /j/ or a similar semi-vowel, like the y in English "yes" or "boy." This form has been used regularly in Church Slavonic since the 16th century, but it officially became a separate letter of alphabet much later (In Russian, only in 1918). The original name of ⟨й⟩ was I s kratkoy ('I with the short '), later I kratkoye ('short I') in Russian, similarly I kratko in Bulgarian, but Yot in Ukrainian. For the details, see the article Short I.
Cyrillic alphabets of non-Slavic languages have additional ⟨и⟩-based letters, like ⟨Ӥ⟩ or ⟨Ӣ⟩.
Read more about this topic: I (Cyrillic)
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