Soft sign
Encyclopedia
The soft sign also known as (the front) yer
, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic
, it represented a short (or "reduced") front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer, the vowel phoneme
it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels. In the modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems (all East-Slavic plus Bulgarian
and Church Slavic), it does not represent an individual sound, but rather indicates softening (palatalization
) of the preceding consonant
or (less commonly) just has a traditional orthographic usage with no phonetic meaning (like Russian туш 'flourish after a toast' and тушь 'India ink', both pronounced [tuʂ], but different in grammatical gender
and declension
). Also, it has a function of "separation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are pronounced separately from the previous consonant and are iotated (compare Russian льют [lʲjut] '(they) pour/cast' and лют [lʲut] '(he is) fierce').
In Slavistic transcription Ь and Ъ are used to denote Protoslavic extra-short sounds /ĭ/ and /ŭ/ respectively (e.g. slověnьskъ adj. ‘slavonic’)
Among Slavic languages, the soft sign has the most limited use in Bulgarian
: since 1945, the only possible position is one between consonants and <о> (for example, in names Жельо, Кръстьо, and Гьончо).
The Cyrillic variant of the Serbian language
(Vukovica) has had no soft sign since the mid-19th century: palatalization is represented by special consonant letters instead of this sign (some of these letters, such as Њ
or Љ
, were designed as ligatures with the soft sign). The modern Macedonian
writing system, based on the Serbian variant, has had no soft sign since its creation in 1944.
Under normal orthographic rules, it has no uppercase form as no word begins with this letter. However, Cyrillic type fonts do normally provide an uppercase form for setting type in all caps
, or for using it as element of various serial numbers (like series of Soviet banknotes) and indices (for example, there once existed a model of Old Russian steam locomotive
s marked "Ь" — :ru:Паровоз Ь).
In the romanization
of Cyrillic words, soft signs are typically replaced with the prime
symbol (or, alternatively, apostrophe
) or just ignored (especially in the final position: Тверь=Tver
, Обь=Ob
etc.).
in the latinized Karelian alphabet
made official in 1931 and used until re-Cyrillicization of Karelian in 1937.
Yer
The letter yer of the Cyrillic alphabet, also spelled jer or er, is known as the hard sign in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets and as er golyam in the Bulgarian alphabet...
, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...
, it represented a short (or "reduced") front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer, the vowel phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels. In the modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems (all East-Slavic plus Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
and Church Slavic), it does not represent an individual sound, but rather indicates softening (palatalization
Palatalization
In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
) of the preceding consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
or (less commonly) just has a traditional orthographic usage with no phonetic meaning (like Russian туш 'flourish after a toast' and тушь 'India ink', both pronounced [tuʂ], but different in grammatical gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
and declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
). Also, it has a function of "separation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are pronounced separately from the previous consonant and are iotated (compare Russian льют [lʲjut] '(they) pour/cast' and лют [lʲut] '(he is) fierce').
In Slavistic transcription Ь and Ъ are used to denote Protoslavic extra-short sounds /ĭ/ and /ŭ/ respectively (e.g. slověnьskъ adj. ‘slavonic’)
Among Slavic languages, the soft sign has the most limited use in Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
: since 1945, the only possible position is one between consonants and <о> (for example, in names Жельо, Кръстьо, and Гьончо).
The Cyrillic variant of the Serbian language
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
(Vukovica) has had no soft sign since the mid-19th century: palatalization is represented by special consonant letters instead of this sign (some of these letters, such as Њ
Nje
Nje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It is a ligature of the Cyrillic letters En ⟨Н⟩ and Soft Sign ⟨Ь⟩. It was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. It corresponds to the digraph ⟨nj⟩ in the Serbian Latin and Croatian alphabets.It is used in Macedonian and Serbian, where it represents a...
or Љ
Lje
Lje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.Lje represents a palatal lateral , a sound similar to the palatalized alveolar lateral which is represented by the digraph ЛЬ and pronounced like the ⟨ll⟩ in "million".Lje was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić...
, were designed as ligatures with the soft sign). The modern Macedonian
Macedonian alphabet
The orthography of Macedonian includes an alphabet , which is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script, as well as language-specific conventions of spelling and punctuation....
writing system, based on the Serbian variant, has had no soft sign since its creation in 1944.
Under normal orthographic rules, it has no uppercase form as no word begins with this letter. However, Cyrillic type fonts do normally provide an uppercase form for setting type in all caps
All caps
In typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
, or for using it as element of various serial numbers (like series of Soviet banknotes) and indices (for example, there once existed a model of Old Russian steam locomotive
Steam locomotive
A steam locomotive is a railway locomotive that produces its power through a steam engine. These locomotives are fueled by burning some combustible material, usually coal, wood or oil, to produce steam in a boiler, which drives the steam engine...
s marked "Ь" — :ru:Паровоз Ь).
In the romanization
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
of Cyrillic words, soft signs are typically replaced with the prime
Prime (symbol)
The prime symbol , double prime symbol , and triple prime symbol , etc., are used to designate several different units, and for various other purposes in mathematics, the sciences and linguistics...
symbol (or, alternatively, apostrophe
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...
) or just ignored (especially in the final position: Тверь=Tver
Tver
Tver is a city and the administrative center of Tver Oblast, Russia. Population: 403,726 ; 408,903 ;...
, Обь=Ob
Ob River
The Ob River , also Obi, is a major river in western Siberia, Russia and is the world's seventh longest river. It is the westernmost of the three great Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean .The Gulf of Ob is the world's longest estuary.-Names:The Ob is known to the Khanty people as the...
etc.).
Name of the letter
- Old Church SlavonicOld Church SlavonicOld Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...
: ѥрь (yerĭ)—meaning of the word is unknown - Church Slavonic: єрь (yer')
- BulgarianBulgarian languageBulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
: ер малък [er ˈma.lək] ('small yer'), whereas the hard sign is named ер голям ('big yer') - RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
: мягкий знак [ˈmʲæxʲ.kʲɪj znak] ('soft sign'), or (an archaic, mostly pre-1917 name) ерь [jerʲ] - UkrainianUkrainian languageUkrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
: м’який знак [mja.ˈkɪj znak] ('soft sign') - BelarusianBelarusian languageThe Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
: мяккі знак [mʲak.kʲi znak] ('soft sign') - SerbianSerbian languageSerbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
(and all its variants): tanko jer/танко јер ('thin yer'), or simply jer/јер ('yer')—whereas the hard sign is named debelo jer/дебело јер ('thick yer') or simply jor/јор ('yor')
Use in Latin alphabets
Ь was also used in the Soviet UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in the latinized Karelian alphabet
Karelian alphabet
The Karelian language is spoken in Russia, mostly in the Karelian Republic and in a small region just north of Tver, though most residents there were expelled in 1939. Karelian has seen numerous proposed and adopted alphabets over the centuries, both Latin-based and Cyrillic...
made official in 1931 and used until re-Cyrillicization of Karelian in 1937.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Ъ ъ : Cyrillic letter Yer : Cyrillic letter Semisoft sign : Cyrillic letter Yat
- Ы ы : Cyrillic letter Yery
- Љ љ : Cyrillic letter Lje
- Њ њ : Cyrillic letter Nje
Computing codes
| character | Ь | ь | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SOFT SIGN |
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SOFT SIGN |
||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1068 | 042C | 1100 | 044C |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
208 172 | D0 AC | 209 140 | D1 8C |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Ь | Ь | ь | ь |
| KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters... and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,... |
248 | F8 | 216 | D8 |
| Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:... |
238 | EE | 237 | ED |
| Code page 866 Code page 866 Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87... |
156 | 9C | 236 | EC |
| Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages... |
220 | DC | 252 | FC |
| ISO-8859-5 | 204 | CC | 236 | EC |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 156 | 9C | 252 | FC |