X-Nico

unusual facts about hard sign



Kommersant

To make the point that the publication had outlasted the Soviet regime, "Kommersant" is spelled in Russian with a terminal hard sign (ъ) – a letter that is silent at the end of a word in modern Russian, and was thus abolished by the post-revolution Russian spelling reform.

Reforms of Russian orthography

The Russian orthography was made simpler by unifying several adjectival and pronominal inflections, replacing the letters ѣ (Yat) with е, і (depending on the context of Moscovian pronunciation) and ѵ with и, ѳ with ф, and dropping the archaic mute yer, including the ъ (the "hard sign") in final position following consonants (thus eliminating practically the last graphical remnant of the Old Slavonic open-syllable system).


see also

B

Ъ ъ : Cyrillic letter Yer (also known as the hard sign, back yer, or tvyordiy znak) is shaped like the letter b, but has no phonetic value on its own in modern East Slavic languages.