Н, the letter en

History

En is the fifteenth letter of the modern Russian alphabet, and it commonly represents the dental nasal consonant /n/, the sound written n in the English word neat. It also occurs palatalized, as /nʲ/: the pair жена, meaning wife, and женин, the possessive formed from it, sets the hard and the soft consonant side by side.

The sources record one specific caution about the written letter. In Serbian and Macedonian cursive, capital Н is among the letters, together with б, д, з and Б, that can be written differently from their Russian counterparts, so a document in one of those languages will not always match Russian expectations. Within Russian itself, handwriting uses the cursive alphabet rather than the block letters seen in printed material, and it is standard practice to write in cursive almost exclusively, so a manuscript page will normally show the cursive rather than the printed shape.

Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid or running script that was the 14th to 17th century chancery hand of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav, and it became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script. Modern Cyrillic italic typefaces are in their lowercase part based mostly on these cursive shapes.

One difference is visible at once in documents written before the reform of 1917 to 1918. That reform made the mute hard sign ъ obsolete in final position following a consonant, so a word that ends in н today was written with ъ after it: мараѳонъ became марафон, and, on the same rule, Петроградъ became Петроград.