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Russian distinguishes hard (unpalatalized or plain) and soft (palatalized) consonants (both phonetically and orthographically). Soft consonants, most of which are denoted by a superscript ʲ , are pronounced with the body of the tongue raised toward the hard palate , like the articulation of the y sound in yes .
Ъ used to be a very common letter in the Russian alphabet. This is because before the 1918 reform, any word ending with a non-palatalized consonant was written with a final Ъ — e.g., pre-1918 вотъ vs. post-reform вот. The reform eliminated the use of Ъ in this context, leaving it the least common letter in the Russian alphabet.
A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ʕ , were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ﻉ , ʿayn, via the reversed apostrophe). [9] Some letter forms derive from existing letters: The right-swinging tail, as in ʈ ɖ ɳ ɽ ʂ ʐ ɻ ɭ , indicates retroflex articulation.
Native Russian speakers' ability to articulate [ɨ] in isolation: for example, in the names of the letters и and ы . [ 1 ] Rare instances of word-initial [ɨ] , including the minimal pair и́кать 'to produce the sound и ' and ы́кать 'to produce the sound ы', [ 2 ] as well as borrowed names and toponyms, like Ыб [ɨp] ⓘ , the ...
There are modifier letters like Ь without an own phoneme, and there are some rules which select between pronunciation variants depending on adjacent letters, but any pair of two letters each having its own pronunciation has not some special pronunciation in Russian when these letters are adjacent. Situation is more complex in other East Slavic ...
The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of я depends also on the following sound by allophony in the Slavic languages. In Russian, before a soft consonant, it is [æ], like in the English "cat". If a hard consonant follows я or none, the result is an open vowel, usually . This difference does not exist in the other Cyrillic languages.
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Russian is written with a modern variant of the Cyrillic script.Russian spelling typically avoids arbitrary digraphs.Except for the use of hard and soft signs, which have no phonetic value in isolation but can follow a consonant letter, no phoneme is ever represented with more than one letter.