Palochka

Palochka (Ӏ ӏ; italics: Ӏ ӏ) (Russian: палочка, tr. palochka; IPA: [ˈpalət͡ɕkə], literally "a stick") is a letter of the Cyrillic script.^[1] This letter usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lowercase text. The capital form of Palochka often looks like the capital form of the Cyrillic letter Dotted I (І і), the capital form of the Latin letter I (I i), and the lowercase form of the Latin letter L (L l),

The letter was introduced during the Cyrillization of the Caucasian languages in the late 1930s. In order to keep new orthography compatible with Russian typewriters many new alphabets did not contain any letters distinct from the ones of the Russian alphabet (sounds absent in Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations). Palochka was the only exception, and in practice while typewriting the digit 1 was used instead. This practice still is common, because Palochka is not present in standard keyboard layouts or common fonts, and so cannot be easily entered or reliably displayed on many computer systems.

In the alphabets of the Caucasian languages Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Chechen, Dargwa, Ingush, Kabardian, Lak, Lezgian and Tabassaran, Palochka has no independent phonetic value, but signals that the preceding consonant is an ejective. (An exception is the Abkhaz language, which does not use palochka for rendering ejectives.)

Example from Avar: кӀалъазе [kʼaˈɬaze], "to speak"

In Adyghe, Chechen, Ingush and Kabardian, Palochka also functions as the glottal stop /ʔ/.

Example from Kabardian: елъэӀуащ [jaɬaˈʔʷaːɕ], "he asked her for something"

In Chechen, Palochka represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/.

Computing codes

The lowercase form of palochka was added to Unicode 5.0 in July 2006.

See also

• Cyrillic characters in Unicode

References

1. ^ "Cyrillic: Range: 0400–04FF". The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0. 2010. pp. 42, 43. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0400.pdf. Retrieved 2011-05-23.