Yer

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Heading=Cyrillic letter Yer


uuc=042A|ulc=044AThe letter Yer or Jer (Ъ, ъ) of the Cyrillic alphabet is known as the "hard sign" (твёрдый знак IPA| [ˈtvʲor.dɨj znak] ) in the modern Rusyn and Russian alphabets and as "er golyam" (ер голям, "big yer") in the Bulgarian alphabet. The letter is called back yer (ер обратный) 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 malək" in Bulgaria (Ь, ь), which was originally also a reduced vowel, more frontal than the ъ, 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 њ and љ. The two reduced vowels are together called the yers in Slavic philology.

Original use

In the Old Church Slavonic language, the yer was a vowel letter, indicating the so-called "reduced vowel": ъ = *IPA| [ŭ] , ь = *IPA| [ĭ] in the conventional transcription. These vowels stemmed from the Proto-Balto-Slavic short */u/ and */i/ (compare Latin "" and Old Church Slavonic Unicode|. In all West Slavic languages the yer either disappeared or was transformed into IPA|/e/ 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. беглые IPA| [ˈbʲe.glɨjə] "fugitive" or "fleeting") vowels, which appear and disappear in place of a former "yer". For example:
*OR сънъ IPA|/ˈsŭ.nŭ/ → R сон IPA| [son] "sleep" (nom. sg.)
*OR съна IPA|/sŭˈnа/ → R сна IPA| [sna] "sleep" (gen. sg.)
*OR угълъ IPA|/ˈu.gŭ.lŭ/ → R угол IPA| [ˈu.gəl] "corner" (nom. sg.)
*OR угъла IPA|/u.gŭˈla/ → R угла IPA| [ʊˈgla] "corner" (gen. sg.)

The basic rule governing the fall of the yers in Russian may be stated as follows:

* Strong yers are "fully voiced": ь → е (or ë); ъ → о
* Weak yers drop entirely, except that the palatalization from a following ь 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 ("человекъ" was pronounced as if it was written "человек"). The entry "Ъ" 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”. [ [http://www.vladtv.ru/leksikon.shtml?news=131 "Лексикон" Валерия Скорбилина Архив выпусков программы, «ЛЕКСИКОН» № 238, интервью с Натальей Юдиной, деканом факультета русского языка и литературы] ] "Слово о словах", Лев Успенский, Лениздат, 1962, p. 156] Printers were forced to use a non-standard apostrophe for the separating hard sign, for example:

* pre-reform: съездъ
* transitional: с’езд
* post-reform: съезд

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 didn't 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 (Слово о словах)", 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 "Коммерсантъ" - 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. [ [http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/sections/23/ Артемий Лебедев, Ководство, § 23. Немного о дореволюционной орфографии.] ] It is also sometimes encountered in humorous personal writing.

Modern Russian: Hard sign

In modern Russian the letter "ъ" is called the "hard sign" (твёрдый знак "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 and is therefore written with one of the letters "я", "ё", "е", or "ю" (that are pronounced as "ya", "yo", "ye" and "yu" only in Russian and Bulgarian languages). The hard sign marks the fact that the IPA| [j] continues to be heard in the composition. Example:
*съёмка (IPA| [ˈsjomkə] ): "filming"
*Сёмка (IPA| [ˈsʲomkə] ): male name derived from Семён (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 ь, which always marks the softening of a consonant. However, in part because the degree of softening before ъ is not uniform, these proposals were never implemented. The hard sign ъ is written after both native and borrowed prefixes. In recent years, it has sometimes been seen in borrowed words before the letter и, 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

Only in Bulgarian, the "er golyam" is used for phoneme representing the mid back unrounded vowel (IPA IPA|/ɤ̞/), sometimes also notated as a schwa (IPA|/ə/). It sounds approximately somewhere between the Russian 'o' and 'э'.

Since there is almost no palatalization in between the vowels in Bulgarian, no hard sign was ever usedhuh. Some old words might still occur with an apostrophe instead.

Belarusian language

The letter is absent in the alphabets of the Belarusian. In the Cyrillic Belarusian alphabet its functions are performed by the apostrophe or й. In the Latin Belarusian alphabet (Łacinka) 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 IPA| [j] ) is served by an apostrophe.

References