Hard sign
The letter "Ъ" ("ъ") of the Cyrillic alphabet is known as hard sign (твёрдый знак) in the modern Russian alphabet and as er golyam (ер голям, "big yer") in the Bulgarian alphabet. The letter is called yer in the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old Russian and in Old Church Slavonic.
Original use
In the Old Church Slavonic language, yer was a vowel letter, indicating the so-called "reduced vowel" [ъ]. This vowel did stem from the Indo-European short [u] (compare Latin angŭlŭs and Old Church Slavonic ѪГЪЛЪ). In all West Slavic languages the yer either disappeared or was transformed into long [e] vowel.
Russian language
Old Russian: Yer
From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, the original [ъ] sound became extinct in all Slavic languages; this so-called fall of the yers is typically considered as marking the final disintegration of Common Slavonic. In Russian, the (hard) yer was dropped entirely in "weak" positions, and was replaced with [o] in "strong" positions. As a result, inflection is at times complicated by the so-called "transitive" (lit. "fugitive") vowels (e.g. сон — сна, угол — угла etc.).
The basic rule governing the fall of the yers in Russian may be stated as follows:
- Strong yers are fully voiced: ь > е, ъ > о.
- Weak yers drop entirely, except that once-terminal ь has palatalized the preceding consonant.
- For determining whether a yer is strong or weak, it is necessary to break the continuous flow of speech into individual words, or very common phrases (typically prepositional) which are entirely run together in speech.
- A terminal yer is weak.
- A yer which is followed in the next syllable by a non-reduced vowel is weak.
- The yer in the syllable before one with a weak yer is strong.
- The yer in the syllable before one with a strong yer is weak.
That is, crudely put, in a string of Old Russian syllables each of which has a reduced vowel, the reduced vowels are in modern Russian alternately given full voicing and drop, and the last yer in this sequence will drop. There are some exceptions to this rule, usually considered as the result of analogy.
Modern Russian: Hard sign
In modern Russian the letter "ъ" is called the hard sign. Its function is to indicate that the following iotated vowel letter (letter whose name begins with the sound [j], i.e. е ё ю я) is read as if in the beginning of a word. In this function (being placed between a consonant and a vowel letter), the hard sign does not differ from the soft sign (ь). However, the "hard sign" is written only after prefixes (exceptions may be found only in transcriptions of foreign words).
Bulgarian language
In Bulgarian, the er golyam is used for a vowel, [ə] (Schwa).
Belarusian language
The letter is absent in the alphabets of the Belarusian. In the Cyrillic Belarusian alphabet its functions are performed by the apostrophe mark. In the Latin Belarusian alphabet (Łacinka) functions of soft and hard signs are performed by other means.
Ukrainian language
In Ukrainian, the hard sign is not used. Its purpose (insertion of the [j] sound) is served by an apostrophe.
