Soft sign


The soft sign also known as the front yer or front er, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short 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, it does not represent an individual sound but indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant. It was also used in the Soviet Union in the Latinized Karelian alphabet, made official in 1931 and used until re-Cyrillicization of Karelian in 1937.

Uses and meanings

Palatalization sign

The soft sign is normally written after a consonant and indicates its softening. Less commonly, the soft sign just has a grammatically determined usage with no phonetic meaning. In East Slavic languages and some other Slavic languages, 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. 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 pour/cast' and лют '. The feature, quite consistent with Russian orthography, promulgated a confusion between palatalization and iotation, especially because usually precedes so-called soft vowels. Combinations , , and give iotated vowels, like corresponding vowel letters in isolation, 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 nor for , because these vowels are not iotated in isolation. The latter case, though, is rarely used in Russian 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 followed by an iotated vowel is palatized.

In Bulgarian

Among Slavic languages, the soft sign has the most limited use in Bulgarian: since 1945, the only possible position is one between consonants and .

As a vowel in Slavistic

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

As a vowel in Turkic languages

It is used in Janalif, the first Soviet-made Latin alphabet, to denote ɯ; its Cyrillic equivalent is ы.

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.
There were proposals to use the same for Turkic languages, as a replacement to Cyrillic Schwa 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.

As a modifier letter

Along with the hard sign and the palochka, the soft sign is a modifier letter in Caucasian languages and Crimean Tatar. Its function is to create a new sound, such as i.e. гь, which is used in Avar, Archi, and Tabasaran to denote /h/.

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 and indices.
In the romanization of Cyrillic words, soft signs are typically replaced with the prime symbol ′. Occasionally, an apostrophe is used, or the soft sign can even be ignored if it is in a position that it does not denote iotation: Тверь=Tver, Обь=Ob.

Name of letter