I with bowl

I with bowl (majuscule: Ь, minuscule: ь) is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet. It was introduced in 1928 into the reformed Yañalif, and later into other alphabets for Soviet minority languages. The letter was designed specifically to represent the non-front close vowel sounds IPA: [ɨ] and IPA: [ɯ].[1] Thus, this letter corresponds to the letter I ı in modern Turkic alphabets.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

I with bowl
Due to the absence of a character in Unicode, it cannot be displayed in computer-compatible fonts;  in some cases, graphemes similar in style can be used instead.
Usage
Writing systemLatin script
TypeAlphabetic
Language of originYañalif
Phonetic usage[ɯ]
[ɤ̆]
[ɨ]
History
Development
  • '
Other
Writing directionLeft-to-Right

Usage

The letter was originally included in the Yañalif, and later also in the alphabets of the Kurdish, Abaza, Sami, Ingrian, Kalmyk, Komi, Tsakhur, Azerbaijani and Bashkir languages, as well as in the draft reform of the Udmurt alphabet. During the project of the Latinization of the Russian language, this letter corresponded to the Cyrillic letter Ы ы. In Kalmyk, however, it represented palatalisation of the preceding consonant, thus corresponding to the Cyrillic homoglyph Ь ь.

In languages and alphabets that used this letter, the lowercase form of B was a small capital ʙ so that there would be no confusion between b and ь.

Encoding

A Latin letter I with bowl hasn't been adopted into Unicode because of the concern that encoding it could open the door to "duplicating the whole Cyrillic alphabet as Latin letters."[8][9][10][11] Instead, computer and mobile users can substitute similar letters, either Ь ь or Ƅ ƅ (Latin letter tone six, the letter that was previously used in the Zhuang alphabet to denote the sixth tone IPA: [˧]).

See also

References

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