The soft sign (Ь, ь), 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 ‹ъ›, 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 palatalization of the preceding consonant.
‹Ь› 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.
Read more about Soft Sign: Representations, Name of The Letter, Related Letters and Other Similar Characters, Computing Codes
Famous quotes containing the words soft and/or sign:
“O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering-sweet to the touch?”
—Frances Cornford (1886–1960)
“The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?”
—Hugo Ball (1886–1927)