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The 'soft sign' (Ь, ь) is a symbol in the Cyrillic alphabet. In the Old Slavonic language, it represented a short [i]-like vowel; but in modern Slavonic Cyrillic writing systems (all East-Slavic plus Bulgarian and Church Slavonic), it does not represent an individual sound but just indicates softening (palatalization) of the preceding consonant—or just has a traditional orthographical usage with no phonetical meaning (like Russian ''туш'' ‘flourish after a toast’ and ''тушь'' ‘india ink’, both pronounced , but different in grammatical gender and declension). Also, it has a function of "separation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are pronounced separately from the previous consonant and are yotified (compare Russian ''льют'' '(they) pour/cast' and ''лют'' '(he is) fierce'). That is, the soft sign is functionally rather a modifier of the neighboring letters than a real letter itself.
Among Slavonic languages, soft sign has the most limited use in Bulgarian: since 1945, the only possible position is one between consonants and 'o' (for example, in names ''Жельо, Кръстьо, Гьончо'' etc.).
Cyrillic variant of the Serbian alphabet (Vukovica) has no soft sign since mid-19th century: palatalization is represented by special consonant letters instead of this sign (some of these letters, like Њ or Љ, were designed as ligatures with the soft sign). Modern Macedonian writing system created in 1944 after Serbian origin had no soft sign from the very beginning.
No words start with it, and under normal orthographic rules it has no uppercase form. However, Cyrillic type fonts do normally provide an uppercase form for setting type in all caps, or for using it as element of various serial numbers (like series of Soviet banknotes) and indices (for example, there existed model of old Russian steam locomotives marked "Ь").
In the romanization of Cyrillic words, soft signs are typically replaced with apostrophes or just ignored (especially in the final position: Тверь=Tver, Обь=Ob etc.).

Contents

Name of the letter

See also

Name of the letter

★ Old Slavonic: ''ѥрь'' (yerĭ)—meaning of the word is unknown

★ Church Slavonic: ''єрь'' (yer’)

★ Bulgarian: ''ер малък'' (="small yer"), whereas the hard sign is named ''ер голям'' (="big yer")

★ Russian: ''мягкий знак'' (="soft sign"), or (an archaic, mostly pre-1917 name) ''ерь''

★ Ukrainian: ''м’який знак'' (="soft sign")

★ Belarusian: ''мяккі знак'' (="soft sign")

★ Serbocroatian (and its descendants): ''tanko jer/танко јер'' (="thin yer"), or simply ''jer/јер'' (yer)—whereas the hard sign is named ''debelo jer/дебело јер'' (="thick yer") or simply ''jor/јор'' (yor)

See also

★ Ъ (yer or hard sign)

★ iotation

★ Ы (yery), Љ (lje) and Њ (nje)—ligatures with soft sign

★ Ҍ (semisoft sign), graphically identical to Ѣ (Yat)