![]() Historically, they also had a rule that no syllable could end in a consonant, but as the short vowels represented by the yers vanished, the letters were repurposed to be hard or soft markers when there isn't a following vowel. "Ь": (soft sign / front yer, which historically made a vowel sound, but now just marks a consonant as soft, like silent E after C and G) note Slavic languages tend to have hard and soft versions of consonants with the soft versions typically adding a Y sound, with separate letters for each vowel for after a hard or soft consonant."Ъ": (hard sign / back yer, which historically made a vowel sound and still represents the schwa in Bulgarian, but now just marks a consonant as hard, like the ue in cheq ue)."Х": (guttural "kh", like the 'ch' in the Scottish 'loch', or the hard 'ch' in German 'Buch')."Ё": (yo not just a fronted/raised Е with a Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut).The number of Cyrillic letters that look similar or identical to Latin letters or numbers but represent slightly or entirely different phonemes doesn't help either: X: 'Ж' (zh) (pronounced like 'plea sure').W: 'Ш' (sh), 'Щ' (shch note well, scht like in schtick in Bulgarian).A: 'Д' (d) note even though (or more likely, because) the Cyrillic А is identical to the Latin A.N: 'И' (i), sometimes even 'Й' ("short И", equivalent of j/y).r: 'Г' (g in Russian, h in Ukrainian and Belarusian) (as in Gamma).note This is a simplified form (via cursive) of “ Little Yus ” (Ѧ ѧ), an archaic Cyrillic letter that originally represented a nasalized front vowel (compare “ę” in Polish), but came to represent the sound “ya” in Russian. Latin letters and the Cyrillic letters incorrectly substituted for them: The perpetrators ignore the fact that these letters are, in actual Russian, pronounced completely differently from the Latin characters they are supposed to represent, which can result in a tricky reading task for those who can read Cyrillic script.īelow is a list of popular letters used with this trope, and their proper pronunciations: Where the (English form of the) Latin alphabet has twenty-six letters, the (Russian form of the) Cyrillic alphabet has thirty-three. The Latin alphabet itself is based – via the Etruscan/Old Italic one – on the archaic (pre-classical) Greek one, and Hebrew and Greek scripts are based on Phoenician script, so they are all related. This has resulted in an alphabet with letters that range from deceptively familiar to the strikingly different. This is because Cyrillic is based on medieval Greek completed with Glagolitic (sometimes inspired by Hebrew – ц, ш) letters, but due to reforms by Peter the Great, it has the same basic design principles as the Latin alphabet (stroke thickness and placement, etc.). Don't expect them to be consistent with it, though. In a lot of Western posters, you see something that could be called "Faux Cyrillic" – replacing Latin characters with visually similar Cyrillic ones, to make something look more Russian.
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