High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The soft sign (Ь, ь), also known as (the front) yer, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short (or "reduced") front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer, the vowel phoneme it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels. In the modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems (all East-Slavic plus Bulgarian and Church Slavic), it does not represent an individual sound, but rather indicates softening (palatalization) of the preceding consonant or (less commonly) just has a traditional orthographic usage with no phonetic meaning (like Russian туш `flourish after a toast` and тушь `India ink`, both pronounced , but different in grammatical gender and declension). Also, it has a function of "separation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are pronounced separately from the previous consonant and are iotated (compare Russian льют `(they) pour/cast` and лют `(he is) fierce`).