Long I

Long i (i longum or [littera] i longa), written $\langleꟾ\rangle$, is a variant of the I|letter i found in ancient and early medieval forms of the Latin script.

History
In inscriptions dating to the early Roman Empire, it is used frequently but inconsistently to transcribe the long vowel. In Gordon's 1957 study of inscriptions, it represented this vowel approximately 4% of the time in the 1st century CE, then 22.6% in the 2nd century, 11% in the 3rd, and not at all from the 4th century onward, reflecting a loss of phonemic vowel length by this time (one of the phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance). In this role it is equivalent to the (also inconsistently-used) apex, which can appear on any long vowel: $\langle\rangle$. An example would be $⟨⟩$, which is generally spelled fīliī today, using macrons rather than apices to indicate long vowels. On rare occasions, an apex could combine with long i to form $⟨⟩$, e.g. $⟨⟩$.

The long i could also be used to indicate the semivowel [j], e.g. $\langleI VSTVS \rangle$ or $\langle CVI I VS \rangle$, the latter also $\langle CV I VS \rangle$, pronounced. It was also used to write a close allophone of the short i phoneme, used before another vowel, as in $⟨CLAVD I O⟩$, representing.

Later on in the late Empire and afterwards, in some forms of New Roman cursive, as well as pre-Carolingian scripts of the Early Middle Ages such as Visigothic or Merovingian, it came to stand for the vowel $\langlei\rangle$ in word-initial position. For example, $⟨i N ponunt in umeroſ⟩$, which would be inpōnunt in umerōs in modern spelling.

In Unicode
The character exists in Unicode as U+A7FE, $\langleꟾ\rangle$, having been suggested in a 2006 proposal.