What is "palochka"

n. A letter added to the Cyrillic alphabet when used in writing several of the Caucasian languages. It looks exactly like uppercase Roman letter i, but had no lowercase form until recently. In the days of the mechanical typewriter, this letter was the Roman numeral i, which was included on most Cyrillic typewriters for use in typing dates (e.g., 25.XII.1953 г.).

The palochka or palotchka (Ӏ ӏ; italics: Ӏ ӏ) (, literally "a stick") is a letter in the Cyrillic script. The letter usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lowercase text. The capital form of the palochka often looks like the capital form of the Cyrillic letter soft-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 North-Caucasian languages in the late 1930s. To keep new orthographies compatible with Russian typewriters, many of the new alphabets contained only letters found in the Russian alphabet. Sounds absent in Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations. The palochka was the only exception, and in practice in typewriting, the Arabo-European digit 1 was used instead. In fact, on Russian typewriters this character did not look like digit 1 but looked like a Roman numeral I with serifs. That is still common because the palochka is not present in most standard keyboard layouts (and, for some of them, not even the soft-dotted I) 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, Dargwa, Ingush, Kabardian, Lak, Lezgian and Tabassaran, the 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: , "to speak"

In Adyghe, Ingush and Kabardian, Palochka is also a glottal stop .

• Example from Kabardian: , "he asked her for something"

In Chechen, the palochka represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative .

• Example from Chechen: , "boy"