soft sign

The soft sign (Ь, ь, italics ''Ь'', ''ь'') also known as the front yer, front jer, or er malak (lit. "small er") 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 that it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels.

In the modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems in which it appears (all East Slavic languages and Bulgarian and Church Slavic), it does not represent an individual sound but indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant.

Uses and meanings

Palatalization sign

The soft sign is normally written after a consonant and indicates its ''softening'' (palatalization) (for example Ukrainian батько 'father'). Less commonly, the soft sign just has a grammatically determined usage with no phonetic meaning (like russian: туш 'fanfare' and тушь 'India ink', both pronounced but different in grammatical gender and declension). In East Slavic languages and some other Slavic languages (such as Bulgarian), there are some consonants that do not have phonetically different palatalized forms but corresponding letters still admit the affixing soft sign.

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet has had no soft sign as a distinct letter since the mid-19th century: palatalization is represented by special consonant letters instead of the sign (some of these letters, such as or , were designed as ligatures with the grapheme of the soft sign). The modern Macedonian alphabet, based on the Serbian Cyrillic variant, has had no soft sign since its creation, in 1944.

Before a vowel in East Slavic languages

Between a consonant and a vowel, the soft sign bears also a function of "iotation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are iotated (compare Russian льют '(they) pour/cast' and лют '(he is) fierce'). The feature, quite consistent with Russian orthography, promulgated a confusion between palatalization and iotation, especially because usually precedes so-called ''soft vowels''. Combinations (ya), (ye), (yo) and (yu) give iotated vowels, like corresponding vowel letters in isolation (and word-initially), and unlike its use immediately after a consonant letter in which palatalization can occur but not iotation. In those cases, may be considered as a sign indicating that a vowel after it is pronounced separately from the previous consonant, but that is the case neither for (yi) nor for (yo), because these vowels are not iotated in isolation. The latter case, though, is rarely used in Russian (only in loanwords such as ) and can be seen as a replacement of phonetically identical , which gets rid of an "inconvenient" letter . In Ukrainian and Bulgarian, the spelling indicates palatalization, not iotation.

, an "unpalatalization sign", also denotes iotation, as in the case of , , and in Russian.

Similarly, the soft sign may denote iotation in Belarusian and Ukrainian, but it is not used so extensively as in Russian. Ukrainian uses a quite different repertoire of vowel letters from those of Russian and Belarusian, and iotation is usually expressed by an apostrophe in Ukrainian. Still the soft sign is used in Ukrainian if the sound preceded by an iotated vowel is palatalized.

In Bulgarian

Among Slavic languages using the Cyrillic script, the soft sign has the most limited use in Bulgarian: since 1945, the only possible position is one between consonants and (such as in names Жельо, Кръстьо, and Гьончо).

As a vowel in Slavic studies

In Slavistic transcription, Ь and Ъ are used to denote Proto-Slavic extra- short sounds and respectively (slověnьskъ ''adj''. 'Slavonic'), like Old Slavonic orthography.

Digraphs

Аь

The soft sign does not occur after vowels in Slavic languages, but the digraph for // or // was introduced to some non-Slavic Cyrillic-based alphabets such as Chechen, Ingush and various Dagestanian languages such as Tabasaran. Similarly, the digraph was introduced for // or //, and for //, plus iotated forms such as and as required. This use of ь is similar to a trailing ''e'' as used in, for example, German, when umlauts are unavailable (cf. Goethe).

There were proposals to use the same for Turkic languages, as a replacement to Cyrillic Schwa (Ә) for or . Unlike Schwa, which is not represented in many Cyrillic character repertoires such as Windows-1251, both and are readily available as letters of the basic modern Russian alphabet.

Consonants

Like the hard sign and the palochka, many languages use the soft sign forms digraphs to represent sounds which are phonetically similar, yet distinct phonemes from the bare letter. For example, while г represents //, гь represents // in Crimean Tatar, // in Archi, and // in Avar and Tabasaran.

Representations

Under normal orthographic rules, it has no uppercase form, as no word begins with the letter. However, Cyrillic type fonts normally provide an uppercase form for setting type in all caps or for using it as an element of various serial numbers (like series of Soviet banknotes) and indices (for example, there was once a model of old Russian steam locomotive
marked "Ь"
nbsp;– :ru:Паровоз Ь).

In the romanization of Cyrillic, the soft sign is typically transliterated with . Sometimes is used, or the soft sign may be ignored if it is in a position that it does not denote iotation, for example: Тверь=Tver, Обь= Ob. It can also be transcribed "y" or "i" if preceding a vowel.

In Belarusian it is romanized as a combining acute, e.g., зь , ць , нь , ль .

Name of letter

* be, мяккі знак, lit=soft sign,
* bg, ер малък, lit=small yer, , the hard sign  being named bg, ер голям, lit=big yer, label=none
* cu, єрь, translit=yerʹ
** cu, ѥрь, translit=yerĭ, label=Old Church Slavonic, with unknown meaning
**
**
**
* Kazakh: жіңішкелік белгісі, lit. 'sign of softness', Kazakh pronunciation: �ɘŋɘʃkʲelɘk.bʲelɡɘsɘ* ky, ичкертүү белгиси
* russian: мягкий знак, lit=soft sign, or (archaic, mostly pre-1917 name) russian: ерь, label=none
* sr, tanko jer / танко јер, lit=thin yer, or simply sr, je / јер, lit=yer, label=none, the hard sign  being named sr, debelo jer / дебело јер, lit=thick yer, label=none or sr, jor / јор, lit=yor, label=none
* uk, м’який знак, translit=miakyi znak, translit-std=ungegn, lit=soft sign,
* uz, yumshatish belgisi

Related letters and other similar characters

* Latin letter B, which lowercase letter is nearly identical
*Ъ ъ : Cyrillic letter Hard sign
*Ҍ ҍ : Cyrillic letter Semisoft sign
*Ѣ ѣ : Cyrillic letter Yat
*Ы ы : Cyrillic letter Yery
*Љ љ : Cyrillic letter Lje
*Њ њ : Cyrillic letter Nje
*' : Apostrophe
*, : I with bowl
* Й and Ј, Cyrillic letters

Computing codes

References

{{Wiktionary, soft sign, Ь, ь