Talk:Ukrainian I

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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)