soft sign

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

English

[edit]

Etymology

[edit]
The uppercase and lowercase versions of the soft sign.

Calque of Russian мя́гкий знак (mjáxkij znak),[1] from мя́гкий (mjáxkij, palatal, palatized, soft) + знак (znak, mark, sign).

Pronunciation

[edit]

Noun

[edit]

soft sign (plural soft signs)

  1. The Cyrillic letter Ь/ь (transliterated in English with an apostrophe () or prime ()), which in modern languages using the Cyrillic alphabet serves to denote a soft (palatized) consonant.
    Synonyms: front jer, front yer
    Antonym: hard sign

Hypernyms

[edit]

Translations

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ soft sign, n.” under soft, adj.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2021; soft sign, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

[edit]