The syllables ‘Zhi’ and ‘shi’ in Russian are always written with the letter ‘I’
This is one of the fundamental rules of the Russian language, taught from elementary school.
Words containing the syllables ‘Zhi’ (as in ‘жираф’ – ‘giraffe’) and ‘Shi’ (as in ‘шикарный’ – ‘chic’) must always be written with the letter ‘И’ (‘I’), not ‘Ы’ (‘Y’). And this is not merely a whim of linguists.
In Old Russian, the sounds ‘Ж’ (‘Zh’) and ‘Ш’ (‘Sh’) were soft. After soft consonants, the vowel ‘И’ (‘I’) naturally followed, which became the established spelling. However, by the 14th-15th centuries, these sibilant sounds lost their softness and became hard. However, the orthography that had developed earlier proved to be more conservative than pronunciation and preserved the historical spelling.
