The soft sign and hard sign, why does the Russian language need two letters without sound

Open a Russian newspaper from 1916. The first thing that will catch your eye is not the yat.

The hard sign will be thrown out. It sticks out almost everywhere: годъ, былъ, министръ, Петербургъ. It pronounces nothing, changes nothing, just takes up space.

Lev Uspensky dedicated a chapter to it titled «The Most Expensive Letter in the World» and once counted it. He took the 1897 four-volume edition of «War and Peace,» over two thousand pages, and it came out to about fifty-five hard signs per page, roughly three and a half percent of all letters. If one were to collect them in a row, it would make more than seventy pages of hard signs alone.

The strangest thing is that the reader didn't pronounce them. Once upon a time, the yer was a real letter with its own short vowel sound, and in writing it also helped show where a word ended, back before spaces had become a habit. The sound died centuries before the letter itself, spaces appeared, but people kept writing the yer.

A few years after that newspaper, almost all of those signs disappeared. But one remained and still lives to this day in the doorway, the off-ramp, and the advertisement.

A more interesting question than the school one about «when the hard sign is written.» Why wasn't it removed along with all the others?

What exactly did the reform abolish

The reform of 1917 and 1918 deleted the hard sign at the end of words. Dom became dom, stol stol.

And they left the letter inside the word, and this is where it gets interesting.

Because it works inside the word

Take it away from ate. You get sat, and that's a different action.

Take it out of the entrance hall. It will become an entrance hal, and the word will fall apart when read.

The sign stands between the prefix and the root and indicates that the following sound is read as 'y'. The work is small, but it is still needed, which is why the modern ъ (hard sign) has remained a separating sign.

By the way, it used to be used more broadly. People used to write съэкономить (to save), разъикаться (to start hiccuping), двухъаршинный (two-arshyn long). Some of these spellings persisted into the Soviet era, and the 1956 rulebook solidified the use of ъ roughly within the boundaries we have today. It also used to distinguish between words that now look identical, like подарочного (gift, adj.) and подъарочного (under-arch, adj.).

Couldn't all the work have been given to the soft sign

It would seem, why keep two silent letters.

The work could theoretically have been given to another character, and in practice such a replacement even came about. In November 1918, printing houses began removing the type for abolished letters, along with the ъ. There was nothing left to print the separating sign with, and forms like под’езд (entrance) and об’явление (announcement) appeared in typesetting. The reform itself did not provide for anything of the kind; it removed the final ъ, but kept it inside words.

Besides, family and stairway are structured differently. In stairway, the prefix at the beginning ends with a consonant. In family, there is no prefix, the sign sits inside the word.

This leads to the most common mistake made by those learning Russian: "pod'ezd.".

The person already knows that a separator is needed before the "e"; they're more familiar with the soft sign, so they write the letter they recognize. It's a reasonable approach, but the result is incorrect. Break the word down into parts—"plus" and "ezd"—and the problem will solve itself.

And yes, the aide ruins everything

There is no Russian prefix there. Just like in the subject with injection.

These words came from other languages along with their prefixes, and the sign in them is simply memorized.

Horse, family, mouse

With the soft sign, it's even more confusing. It holds three jobs at once, and three words show this better than any explanation.

In the word "конь" (kon'), it indicates the sound. The soft sign shows the softness of "н" (n), and without it, you get "кон" (kon), a different word.

In the word “family,” its main function is to distinguish. It shows that the “ya” is pronounced with a yot, which is why “family” differs from “seed.” The same applies to “blizzard,” “dress,” and “friends.” And “nightingales” and “streams” are separate cases, because this symbol can also appear before the letter “i,” and this particular rule is the one most often forgotten.

In the word “mouse,” it has nothing to do with either of those things. The “sh” in Russian is always hard, and the soft sign does not soften it. Here, it serves a grammatical function. In nouns following a sibilant, its spelling depends on gender: “mouse” and “rye” versus “knife” and “walrus.” With verbs, it serves the same purpose; hence, you write “pish’,” “berech’,” and “rezh’.”.

And is a cocktail feminine then?

Here, the rule is chasing its own tail.

If, after “mouse” and “rye,” you try to remember that the word with the soft sign is feminine, that whole theory will fall apart at the very first cocktail. The cocktail is masculine. So is “horse.” And so is the dictionary.

In the story about the mouse, it wasn't the sign itself that was important, but the hissing sound that came before it. As for the other words, genus You have to know it separately.

Why is there no soft sign in the word dochka

There is a daughter (дочь), but there is no little daughter (дочка).

There is a short list of combinations where the sign is not written, even though your hand reaches for it. Most often mentioned are chk, chn, nch, nshch, shchn, and rshch. Tochka, vechny, konchik, svarshchik.

Cheat sheet

Practice right here

Below is a training tool for three types of tasks. First, we remove the sign from the word and see what breaks, then we decide if it is needed at all, and then we choose between the soft and hard sign.

How to practice this

Come up with pairs of words that differ by one character. Kon and kon (horse) come to mind immediately, and after that you have to search. Mel and mel (shoal), polka and polka (Polka dance), bank and banka (little bank), el (ate) and el (spruce). Such pairs are hard to find, but what is found is remembered forever. With a child, the same thing goes like a timed game.

The second task is harder. Take a paragraph where the punctuation marks are placed incorrectly, and instead of just correcting it, explain for each spot which rule a person applied and where it stopped working.

At Palme School, we conduct online classes with children from four to seventeen years old, in small groups. You can start on two free lessons. First, the methodologist will determine the level and select a group, and then a regular lesson with the teacher will take place.

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