| Cyrillic letter Soft Sign |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode (hex) | ||||||
| majuscule: U+042C | ||||||
| minuscule: U+044C | ||||||
| Cyrillic script Slavic letters |
||||||
| А | Б | В | Г | Ґ | Д | Ђ |
| Ѓ | Е | Ѐ | Ё | Є | Ж | З |
| Ѕ | И | Ѝ | І | Ї | Й | Ј |
| К | Л | Љ | М | Н | Њ | О |
| П | Р | С | Т | Ћ | Ќ | У |
| Ў | Ф | Х | Ц | Ч | Џ | Ш |
| Щ | Ъ | Ы | Ь | Э | Ю | Я |
| Non-Slavic letters | ||||||
| Ӑ | Ӓ | Ә | Ӛ | Ӕ | Ғ | Ҕ |
| Ӻ | Ӷ | Ԁ | Ԃ | Ꚉ | Ӗ | Ӂ |
| Җ | Ӝ | Ԅ | Ҙ | Ӟ | Ԑ | Ӡ |
| Ԇ | Ӣ | Ҋ | Ӥ | Қ | Ӄ | Ҡ |
| Ҟ | Ҝ | Ԟ | Ԛ | Ӆ | Ԓ | Ԡ |
| Ԉ | Ԕ | Ӎ | Ӊ | Ң | Ӈ | Ҥ |
| Ԣ | Ԋ | Ӧ | Ө | Ӫ | Ҩ | Ԥ |
| Ҧ | Ҏ | Ԗ | Ҫ | Ԍ | Ҭ | Ԏ |
| Ӯ | Ӱ | Ӳ | Ү | Ұ | Ҳ | Ӽ |
| Ӿ | Һ | Ԧ | Ҵ | Ҷ | Ӵ | Ӌ |
| Ҹ | Ꚇ | Ҽ | Ҿ | Ӹ | Ҍ | Ӭ |
| Ԙ | Ԝ | Ӏ | ||||
| Archaic letters | ||||||
| Ҁ | Ѻ | Ѹ | Ѡ | Ѿ | Ѣ | Ꙓ |
| Ꙗ | Ѥ | Ѧ | Ѫ | Ѩ | Ѭ | Ѯ |
| Ѱ | Ѳ | Ѵ | Ѷ | Ꙟ | ||
| List of Cyrillic letters | ||||||
| Cyrillic digraphs | ||||||
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, 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 softening (palatalization) of the preceding consonant or (less commonly) just has a traditional orthographic usage with no phonetic meaning (like Russian туш 'flourish after a toast' and тушь 'India ink', both pronounced [tuʂ], 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 iotated (compare Russian льют [lʲjut] '(they) pour/cast' and лют [lʲut] '(he is) fierce').
In Slavistic transcription Ь and Ъ are used to denote Protoslavic extra-short sounds /ĭ/ and /ŭ/ respectively (e.g. slověnьskъ adj. ‘slavonic’)
Among Slavic languages, the soft sign has the most limited use in Bulgarian: since 1945, the only possible position is one between consonants and <о> (for example, in names Жельо, Кръстьо, and Гьончо).
The Cyrillic variant of the Serbian language (Vukovica) has had no soft sign since the mid-19th century: palatalization is represented by special consonant letters instead of this sign (some of these letters, such as Њ or Љ, were designed as ligatures with the soft sign). The modern Macedonian writing system, based on the Serbian variant, has had no soft sign since its creation in 1944.
Under normal orthographic rules, it has no uppercase form as no word begins with this letter. 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 once existed a model of Old Russian steam locomotives marked "Ь" — ru:Паровоз Ь).
In the romanization of Cyrillic words, soft signs are typically replaced with the prime symbol (or, alternatively, apostrophe) or just ignored (especially in the final position: Тверь=Tver, Обь=Ob etc.).
Contents |
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.
| character | Ь | ь | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SOFT SIGN |
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SOFT SIGN |
||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 1068 | 042C | 1100 | 044C |
| UTF-8 | 208 172 | D0 AC | 209 140 | D1 8C |
| Numeric character reference | Ь | Ь | ь | ь |
| KOI8-R and KOI8-U | 248 | F8 | 216 | D8 |
| Code page 855 | 238 | EE | 237 | ED |
| Code page 866 | 156 | 9C | 236 | EC |
| Windows-1251 | 220 | DC | 252 | FC |
| ISO-8859-5 | 204 | CC | 236 | EC |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 156 | 9C | 252 | FC |
