Small capital I
Additional letter of the Latin alphabet
Small capital I is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet similar in its dimensions to the Latin letter "I" but with a shape based on ⟨I⟩, its capital form. Although ⟨ɪ⟩ is usually an allograph of the Latin letter I i, it is considered as an additional letter in the African reference alphabet and has been used as such in some publications in the Kulango languages in Côte d'Ivoire in the 1990s. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the lowercase small capital I /ɪ/ is used as the symbol for the near-close near-front unrounded vowel, like the letter i in the word "fit".
01Encoding
Until Unicode 8.0.0 (2015), uppercase I with crossbars was not yet encoded. To fill out the gap, a number of fonts contained a non-standard glyph, or used a code point from Private Use Area of Unicode. But this oddity has gone since the 9.0 version of Unicode (2016).
02Glyphs
In serif (and some other) typefaces the letter "ɪ" usually has two crossbars, which distinguishes it from the lowercase "ı" (dotless I), otherwise homoglyphical, but whose upper serif has another configuration.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Small capital I”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- I with crossbars - uppercase and lowercase.svg by Denis Moyogo Jacquerye, CC BY-SA 3.0
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