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Yer
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The letter Yer or Jer (?, ?) of the Cyrillic alphabet is known as the hard sign (??????? ???? ) in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets and as er golyam (?? ?????, "big yer") in the Bulgarian alphabet. The letter is called back yer (?? ????????) in the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old Russian, and in Old Church Slavonic. Originally the yer denoted an ultra-short or reduced middle rounded vowel. Its companion is the front yer, now known as the soft sign in Russian and as er mal?k in Bulgarian (?, ?), which was originally also a reduced vowel, more frontal than the ?, and which is today used to mark the palatalization of consonants in all of the Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet, except for Serbian and Macedonian, where it is not used although its traces can be seen in the letters ? and ?.
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Encyclopedia
The letter Yer or Jer (?, ?) of the Cyrillic alphabet is known as the hard sign (??????? ???? ) in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets and as er golyam (?? ?????, "big yer") in the Bulgarian alphabet. The letter is called back yer (?? ????????) in the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old Russian, and in Old Church Slavonic. Originally the yer denoted an ultra-short or reduced middle rounded vowel. Its companion is the front yer, now known as the soft sign in Russian and as er mal?k in Bulgarian (?, ?), which was originally also a reduced vowel, more frontal than the ?, and which is today used to mark the palatalization of consonants in all of the Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet, except for Serbian and Macedonian, where it is not used although its traces can be seen in the letters ? and ?. The two reduced vowels are together called the yers or jers or ers in Slavic philology.
Original use
In the Old Church Slavonic language, the yer was a vowel letter, indicating the so-called "reduced vowel": ? = *, ? = * in the conventional transcription. These vowels stemmed from the Proto-Balto-Slavic short */u/ and */i/ (compare Latin angulus and Old Church Slavonic . In all West Slavic languages the yer either disappeared or was transformed into in strong positions, and in South Slavic languages strong yer reflexes differ widely across dialects.
Russian language
Old Russian: Yer
In Old East Slavic (Old Russian) and Middle Russian, the yers were dropped entirely in "weak" positions, and were replaced by non-reduced vowels in "strong" positions. Modern Russian inflection is therefore at times complicated by the so-called "transitive" (lit. ?????? "fugitive" or "fleeting") vowels, which appear and disappear in place of a former yer. For example:
- OR ???? ? R ??? "sleep" (nom. sg.)
- OR ???? ? R ??? "sleep" (gen. sg.)
- OR ????? ? R ???? "corner" (nom. sg.)
- OR ????? ? R ???? "corner" (gen. sg.)
The basic rule governing the fall of the yers in Russian may be stated as follows:
- Strong yers are fully voiced: ? ? ? (or ë); ? ? ?
- Weak yers drop entirely, except that the palatalization from a following ? generally remains.
- 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. The rule for determining which yers are weak and which are strong is known as Havlík's law.
- 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.
Simply 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 to be the result of analogy with other words or other inflected forms of the same word, with a different original pattern of reduced vowels.
The actual pronunciation of the terminal yer died out between the 15th and the 19th centuries (???????? was pronounced as if it was written ???????). The entry "?" in Vladimir Dal's dictionary says:
Just as we gradually threw out the [weak] yer from the middle of the words, it could be thrown out from the ends, and left only in front of consonants in the middle, where it is needed for pronunciation.
The final yer was finally abolished by the Bolshevik government spelling reform of 1918 during the Russian Civil War. To encourage stubborn printing houses in Petrograd to apply the new rules, red sailors of the Baltic Fleet confiscated type carrying the “letter parasite”. Printers were forced to use a non-standard apostrophe for the separating hard sign, for example:
- pre-reform: ??????
- transitional: ?’???
- post-reform: ?????
After the end of the Civil War the hard sign was gradually restored as the separator. The apostrophe was still used afterward on some typewriters which did not include the hard sign, which became the rarest letter in Russian.
According to the rough estimation presented in Lev Uspensky's popular linguistics book A Word On Words (????? ? ??????), which expresses strong support to the reform, the final hard sign occupied about 3.5% of the printed texts and essentially wasted a considerable amount of paper, which provided the economic grounds to the reform.
Printing houses set up by the exiled opposition to Bolshevism kept using the pre-reform orthography for some time, but gradually adopted the new spelling.
Today the final yer is sometimes used in Russian brand names—for example, Kommersant ??????????? - either humorously or to convey a feeling of conservative Russian values. Such usage is often inconsistent, as the copywriters may apply the simple rule of putting the hard sign after a consonant at the end of a word, but ignore the other outdated spelling rules. It is also sometimes encountered in humorous personal writing.
Modern Russian: Hard sign
In modern Russian the letter "?" is called the hard sign (??????? ???? tvyordy znak). It has no phonetic value of its own, and is purely an orthographic device. Its function is to separate a number of prefixes ending in a consonant from a following morpheme that begins with an iotated vowel. It is therefore commonly seen in front of the letters "?", "?", "?", and "?" (pronounced ya, yo, ye and yu in Russian and Bulgarian). The hard sign marks the fact that the sound continues to be heard in the composition. Example:
- ?????? : "filming"
- ????? : diminutive form of the male name ????? (Simon)
It therefore functions as a kind of "separation sign" and has been used only sparingly in the aforementioned cases since the spelling reform of 1918. The consonant before the hard sign often becomes somewhat softened (palatalized) due to the following iotation. As a result, in the twentieth century there were occasional proposals to eliminate the hard sign altogether, and replace it with the soft sign ?, which always marks the softening of a consonant. However, in part because the degree of softening before ? is not uniform, these proposals were never implemented. The hard sign ? is written after both native and borrowed prefixes. In recent years, it has sometimes been seen in borrowed words before the letter ?, to mark a greater separation of the constituent syllables. Such written usage has not yet been formally codified (See also Russian phonology and Russian orthography).
Bulgarian language
In Bulgarian, the er golyam is used for the phoneme representing the mid back unrounded vowel (IPA ), sometimes also notated as a schwa . It sounds approximately somewhere between the Russian 'o' and '?'.
Since there is almost no palatalization in between the vowels in Bulgarian, no hard sign was ever used. Some old words might still occur with an apostrophe instead.
Belarusian language
The letter is absent in the alphabets of Belarusian. In the Cyrillic Belarusian alphabet its functions are performed by the apostrophe or ?. In the Latin Belarusian alphabet (Lacinka), functions of soft and hard signs are performed by j.
Ukrainian language
In Ukrainian, the hard sign is not used. Its purpose (non-palatalization of a consonant preceding the ) is served by an apostrophe.
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