Why is there a soft sign

The Russian alphabet is based on the Cyrillic alphabet - an ancient system for depicting sounds in writing. While most Western languages ​​use the Latin alphabet, many have questions about the function of some characters of the Russian alphabet.

Instruction manual

one

Every modern living language has gone through serious evolutionary changes in order to come to a form familiar to today's native speakers. The Russian language is no exception. Its roots go back to the 5-6 centuries of our era, during the formation of the Slavic state. The Slavs united around Novgorod and Kiev lands, and they needed a single language to maintain and develop relations. With the adoption of Christianity in Russia, the issue of language and the spread of writing became more relevant, after which the Bulgarian confessors Cyril and Methodius, two brother missionaries, arrived on Russian soil to create a single written language. Thanks to the invaluable activities of these first scientists, the alphabet was created - Cyrillic.

2

Western and Eastern Slavs maintained mutually beneficial political and trade relations, but spoke different Slavic languages. In order to facilitate intercultural communication and to be able to conduct church services in a single language, the Old Slavonic language was created. It was artificial and contained the common features of the existing Slavic languages, however it became a state language and supports interethnic communication. The first books and important documents were written in the Old Slavonic language, after which Old Russian and other Slavic dialects stood out from it.

3

There were 46 letters in the alphabet of the Old Slavonic language, which subsequently lost their relevance. Some letters, such as "yat", "yus", "fita" disappeared from use, others simply changed their meaning - these are "ep" and "yer".

4

The symbol of the modern Russian soft sign "b" denoted the letter "ery" and had its own vowel sound, middle between [e] and [and]. The letter "b" was used in unstressed syllables (in a weak position), because of which its pronunciation was articulatory fuzzy. We can find traces of “b” in unstressed “E” in the words “darken”, “feather”, etc. In the historical process of the decline of reduced sounds, due to the increased economy of speech efforts, "b" ceased to be pronounced as an intelligible vowel sound, in a weak position it was reduced to zero. For example, if in the word “darken” we still observe a reduced “b”, in the word “darkness” after [t] there is no longer a vowel sound, only a softening soft sign.

5

Thus, the modern soft sign in the Russian language does not produce sound, but serves to soften previous consonants, to separate sounds and to distinguish words. For example, the words "seed" and "family" in spelling and pronunciation differ only due to the soft sign. In morphology, a soft sign helps to determine the grammatical meaning of the word.

6

It is possible that the development of the Russian language will simplify the graphic structure of the alphabet, and "unpronounceable" letters, such as "b" and "b", will disappear from use.