Yi (kana)

Yi (hiragana: 𛀆, katakana: 𛄠) is a Japanese mora or a kana used to write it, though it has never been in standard use.

History
It is presumed that yi would have represented. Along with 𛀁 (ye) and 𛄟 (wu), the mora yi has no officially recognized kana, as these morae do not occur in native Japanese words; however, during the Meiji period, linguists almost unanimously agreed on the kana for yi, ye, and wu. 𛀆 (yi) and 𛄟 (wu) are thought to have never occurred as morae in Japanese, and 𛀁 (ye) was merged with え and エ as a result of regular historical sound changes.

Characters
In the Edo period and the Meiji period, some Japanese linguists tried to separate kana i and kana yi. The shapes of characters differed with each linguist. 𛀆 and 𛄠 were just two of many glyphs.

They were phonetic symbols to fill in the blanks of the gojuon table, but Japanese people did not separate them in normal writing.


 * i
 * Traditional kana
 * い (Hiragana)
 * イ (Katakana)


 * yi
 * Traditional kana
 * い (Hiragana)
 * 𛀆 (Hentaigana of い. Hiragana.𛀆)
 * イ (Katakana)
 * Constructed kana
 * い〻 (い with dots. Hiragana.)
 * 𛀆〻 (𛀆 with dots. Hiragana.)
 * イ〻 (イ with dots. Katakana.)
 * 𛄠 (A part of 以. Katakana.)

These suggestions were not accepted.

Unicode
The hiragana form of this kana is encoded into Unicode as HENTAIGANA LETTER I-1, with the position of U+1B006, while the katakana is encoded as KATAKANA LETTER ARCHAIC YI, in the position U+1B120.