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:
“Even the most incompetent English actor, coming on the stage briefly to announce the presence below of Lord and Lady Ditherege, gives forth a sound so soft and dulcet as almost to be a bar of music. But sometimes that is all there is. The words are lost in the graceful sweep of the notes.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Impoliteness is frequently the sign of an awkward modesty that loses its head when surprised and hopes to conceal this with rudeness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)