Ь, the letter myagky-znak

History

Ь, the soft sign, is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in various Slavic languages. In Old Church Slavonic it represented a short or reduced front vowel, but over time that vowel sound was largely eliminated and merged with other vowel sounds. In most contemporary Slavic Cyrillic writing systems, including the East Slavic ones used for Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, and Church Slavic as well, the soft sign does not represent a distinct sound on its own. It works instead as a visual marker of palatalization of the preceding consonant. Palatalization is the process in which the middle of the tongue moves closer to the hard palate while a consonant is pronounced, giving that consonant a palatal quality or causing it to become a palatal consonant. In Russian the sign is often written after consonants for exactly that purpose, and the specific effect varies with the consonant it follows. Bulgarian uses it far more narrowly, only in front of the letter o, where the combination ьо gives /ʲo/, as in the word гьол. It may also be used as a superscript, ꚝ, in Lithuanian dialectology.

For anyone reading older documents, one habit of the chancery hand matters here. Skoropis developed from semi-ustav in the second half of the 14th century and was used in particular in offices and private office work. Set against semi-ustav, it is marked by word abbreviations, by letters reaching to the top of the line, by an overall simplification of spelling, and by the omission of etymological -ъ and -ь. An etymological soft sign that a modern reader expects at the end of a word may therefore simply not be written.

Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, that rapid or running script, which in turn 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 of books. Skoropis was never a single hand: each scribe had his own handwriting and his own peculiarities of forming and grouping letters, which is why correct reading of such documents depends on comparing a vague place against parts of the same text already read, a skill acquired mainly from practice.