Пришло время для огромного копипаста из Википедии:
Before the spelling reform of 1904, there were several additional letters with diacritical marks.
Vowels:
ĭ — i with breve indicated semivowel i as part of Romanian diphthongs and triphthongs ia, ei, iei etc., or a final, "whispered" sound of the preceding palatalized consonant, in words such as București (/bu.kuˈreʃtʲ/), lupi (/lupʲ/ – "wolves"), and greci (/ɡret͡ʃʲ/ – "Greeks") — Bucurescĭ (the proper spelling at the time used c instead of t, see -ești), lupĭ, grecĭ, like the Slavonic soft sign. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet kept the Cyrillic equivalents of this letter, namely й and ь, but it was abolished in the Romanian Latin alphabet for unknown reasons. By replacing this letter with a simple i without making any additional changes, the phonetic value of the letter i became ambiguous; even native speakers can sometimes mispronounce words such as the toponym Pecica (which has two syllables, but is often mistakenly pronounced with three) or the name Mavrogheni (which has four syllables, not three).[20] Additionally, in a number of words such as subiect "subject"[21] and ziar "newspaper",[22] the pronunciation of i as a vowel or as a semivowel is different among speakers.
