Palochka

In the early times of the Soviet Union, many of the non-Russian Cyrillic alphabets contained only letters found in the Russian alphabet to keep them compatible with Russian typewriters. Sounds absent from Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations. The palochka was the only exception because the numerical digit 1 was used instead of the letter. In fact, on Russian typewriters, the character looked not 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 and so it cannot be easily entered or reliably displayed on many computer systems.

In the alphabets of Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Dargwa, Ingush, Lak, Lezgian, and Tabassaran, it is a modifier letter which signals the preceding consonant as an ejective or aspirated consonant;[1] this letter has no phonetic value on its own. An exception is the Abkhaz language, which does not use the palochka for rendering aspiration, but instead uses the schwa (ә) as a modifier letter for labialization.

In Adyghe, the palochka is also a glottal stop /ʔ/.

• Example from Kabardian Adyghe dialect: елъэӏуащ [jaɬaˈʔʷaːɕ], "he asked her for something"

In Avar

• Example from Avar: кӏалъазе [kʼaˈɬaze], "to speak"

In Chechen, the palochka makes a preceding voiceless stop or affricate ejective, but also represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/ when it does not follow a voiceless stop or affricate. As an exception, in the digraph ⟨хӏ⟩, it produces the voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/.

• Examples from Chechen: йоӏ [joːʕ], "girl" and хӏорд [/ħoːrd/], "sea"

The lowercase form of palochka was added to Unicode 5.0 in July 2006.

• Cyrillic characters in Unicode