Short I
Short I or Yot (Й й; italics: "Й й") is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И with a breve. Short I represents the palatal approximant like the pronunciation of in "yesterday". Depending on the romanization system in use and the Slavic language that is under examination, it can be romanized as , , or . For more details, see romanization of Russian, romanization of Ukrainian, romanization of Belarusian and romanization of Bulgarian. History. Active use of (or, rather, the breve over ) began around the 15th and the 16th centuries. Since the middle of  the 17th century, the differentiation between and is obligatory in the Russian variant of Church Slavonic orthography (used for the Russian language as well). During the alphabet reforms of Peter I, all diacritic marks were removed from the Russian writing system, but shortly after his death, in 1735, the distinction between and was restored. was not officially considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1930s. Because was considered to be a vowel and not a consonant, it was not required to take a hard sign when it came at the end of a word in pre-reform orthography . Usage. In Russian, it appears predominantly in diphthongs like in широкий ("shirokiy" 'wide'), in край ("kray" 'end', 'krai'), in долей ("doley" 'portion'), in горой ("goroy" 'mountain'), and in буйство ("buystvo" 'rage'). It is used in other positions only in foreign words, such as Йopк (York, not with), including fellow Slavic words like Йовович (Yovovich). In Kazakh, like in any others, the letter is used to represent a short ɪ sound (e.g. берейік (tr. (Let us) give). The letter, much like the other 11 Cyrillic letters, will not have another Latin version and merge with Ии (İi). In Serbo-Croatian and  Macedonian, the Cyrillic letter Јe is used to represent the same sound. Latin-based Slavonic writing systems, such as Polish, Czech and the Latin version of Serbo-Croatian use the Latin letter J (not the letter Y, as in English or French), for that purpose. Related letters and other similar characters. Note that breve in Й may be quite different from ordinary breve, the former having a thinner central part and thicker ends (the opposite holds for ordinary breve). This is often seen in serif fonts, cf. Й (Cyrillic Short I) and Ŭ (Latin U with breve). Short I Short