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The palochka or palotchka (Ӏ ӏ; italics: Ӏ ӏ) (Russian: палочка, palochka; [ˈpɑɫət͡ɕkə], 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 in the late 1930s.
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History
In the early times of the Soviet Union, many of the non-Russian cyrillic alphabets contained only letters found in the Russian alphabet in order to keep other orthographies compatible with Russian typewriters. For this reason, sounds absent in Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations. The palochka was the only exception because the numerical digit 1 was used instead of this letter. In fact, on Russian typewriters this character did not look like the digit 1 but like the 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 so it cannot be easily entered or reliably displayed on many computer systems.
Usage
In the alphabets of Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Dargwa, Ingush, 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.
In Adyghe, the palochka is also a glottal stop /ʔ/.
In Avar
In Chechen, the palochka represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/.