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:
“I walked abroad in a snowy day;
I asked the soft snow with me to play;
She played and she melted in all her prime,
And the winter called it a dreadful crime.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)