I Ⰻ

This is the second of the two Glagolitic signs for the vowel i, and it carries the numeral twenty. Old Church Slavonic seems to have had a single i, so the two letters do not record two sounds, and the distribution between them is a matter of scribal habit rather than of pronunciation.

The habits are worth attending to because they are consistent within a tradition and inconsistent between traditions. In some manuscripts one sign is preferred before a vowel and the other before a consonant. In some, one form opens a word and the other does not. In some the choice avoids a collision of two similar shapes. None of these rules is universal, and an editor working on a newly identified fragment will often use the distribution as a first indication of which family of manuscripts it belongs to.

The numeral twenty follows from the Glagolitic system of counting the letters of the alphabet in sequence. This is the eleventh letter and the second of the tens, so it takes twenty, and the count continues in tens through the middle of the alphabet before moving to hundreds.

Because the sound is common the letter is common, and it is one of the signs a reader of the script meets on every line, in both the rounded hand of the earliest codices and the angular hand of the Croatian tradition.

Cyrillic i writes the same vowel and takes the numeral ten, against the twenty that Glagolitic gives it. Ten is the value of Greek iota, and the Cyrillic figure is inherited from it directly. The Glagolitic figure comes from counting its own letters, and the two systems are now a full decimal step apart, which is the clearest divergence so far and the reason a number copied between the scripts without conversion is so easy to misread.

Both alphabets carry two i letters, and both inherit the redundancy from Greek rather than from anything in Slavonic. The parallel is a real point of contact between the scripts: whatever the relationship between them, both were arranged by someone working from the Greek alphabet as it was read in the ninth century, and both carried across a distinction that their own language did not require.

Where they differ is in what happened afterwards. The Cyrillic pair survived into the modern orthographies of several Slavic languages and was reduced by spelling reform at different dates in different countries, so the history of the pair after the medieval period is a history of committees and decrees. The Glagolitic pair simply went out of use with the script, except in the Croatian liturgical tradition, where it lasted for centuries longer.