Rules For Usage in Russian (pre-1918)
- ‹і› was used before all vowels and before the semivowel ‹й›, except at the end of a morpheme in a compound word, where ‹и› is used: пяти + акровый = пятиакровый, (five-acre)
- ‹и› was used as the last letter of a word and before consonants, except in міръ for "world, universe, local community, commons, society, laity", and words derived from it.
The distinction between миръ ("peace") and міръ ("world") lost when they were merged to мир led to the legend that Tolstoy's War and Peace was originally titled "War and (the) World". As it turns out, the spelling of the two variants of мир was an artificial distinction to separate two different definitions of what was originally in fact the same word (much as with English "to" vs. "too").
Read more about this topic: Dotted I (Cyrillic)
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