ɪ
Small capital I is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet similar in its dimensions to the letter "i" but with a shape based on ⟨I⟩, its capital form. Although ⟨ɪ⟩ is usually an allograph of the letter I, it is considered as an additional letter in the African reference alphabet and has been used as such in some publications in Kulango languages in Côte d'Ivoire in the 1990s. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the lowercase small capital I /ɪ/ is used as the symbol for near-close near-front unrounded vowel.
Encoding and forms
It is present in Unicode since 1.0 as U+026A ɪ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL I, and in ISO 6438 as 0xBF.
In serif (and some other) typefaces the letter "ɪ" usually has two crossbars, which distinguishes it from the lowercase "ı" (dotless I), otherwise homoglyphical, but whose upper serif has another configuration.
In sans-serif typefaces it usually does not have crossbars.
Bibliography
- Pascal Boyeldieu, Stefan Elders, Gudrun Miehe. 2008. Grammaire koulango (parler de Bouna, Côte d’Ivoire). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. ISBN 978-3-89645-610-6.
- Diocèse de Bondoukou Nassian. 1992. Syllabaire koulango: réservé aux élèves des cours bibliques en Koulango (Inspiré par les syllabaires de la Société Internationale de Linguistique, collection: « Je lis ma langue », Nouvelles Éditions Africaines / EDICEF). Nassian: Diocèse de Bondoukou.
- UNESCO. 1980. Alphabet africain de référence. Paris: UNESCO, Secteur de la Culture et de la Communication.