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A yer is either of two letters in Cyrillic alphabets, Hard sign (ѥръ, jerŭ) and Soft sign (ѥрь, jerĭ). The Glagolitic alphabet used, as respective counterparts, the letters (Ⱏ) and (Ⱐ). They originally represented phonemically the "ultra-short" vowels in Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic, and are collectively known as the yers.
In all modern Slavic languages, they either sound change into various "full" vowels or disappeared, in some cases causing the palatalization of adjacent consonants. The only Slavic language that still uses "ъ" as a vowel sign (pronounced /ɤ/) is Bulgarian, but in many cases, it corresponds to an earlier Yus, originally pronounced /õ/, used in pre 1945 Bulgarian orthography.
Many languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet have kept one or more of the yers to serve specific orthographic functions.
The back yer ( Ъ, ъ, italics Ъ, ъ) of the Cyrillic script, also spelled jer or er, is known as the hard sign in the modern Russian alphabet and Rusyn alphabet alphabets and as ер голям (er golyam, "big er") in the Bulgarian alphabet. Pre-reform Russian orthography and texts in Old Russian and in Old Church Slavonic called the letter "back yer". Originally, it denoted an ultra-short or reduced vowel Mid vowel rounded vowel.
Its companion, the front yer ( Ь, ь, italics Ь, ь), now known as the soft sign in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, and as ер малък (er malak, "small er") in Bulgarian, originally also represented a reduced vowel, more front vowel than the ъ. Today, it marks the palatalization of consonants in all of the Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic script except Serbian language and Macedonian, which do not use it at all, but it still leaves traces in the forms of the palatalized letters њ and љ. In Bulgarian, it is debated whether the letter palatalises the preceding consonant or is a simple sound . See Bulgarian phonology.
In the modern Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet, ь is also used to represent the palatalization of the previous consonant, while ъ represents a lack of palatalization. However, ъ is only necessary for the purposes of disambiguation between a consonant and an iotation vowel in situations when palatalization should not occur, as by default it would. It is therefore rarely used. As it is not necessary to specify palatalization under those circumstances, the much more common ь is frequently used as a substitute for ъ without any ambiguity arising.
To determine whether a yer is strong or weak, one must break the continuous flow of speech into individual words, or (phrases with only one stressed syllable, typically including a preposition or other clitic words). The rule for determining weak and strong yers is as follows:
In Russian, for example, the yers evolved as follows:
Simply put, in a string of Old Russian syllables, each of which has a reduced vowel, the reduced vowels are, in Modern Russian, alternately given their full voicing or drop: the last yer in the sequence drops. There are some exceptions to the rule, usually considered to be the result of analogy with other words or other inflected forms of the same word, with a different original pattern of reduced vowels. Modern Russian inflection is, therefore, complicated by so-called "transitory" (lit. беглые "fugitive" or "fleeting") vowels, which appear and disappear in place of a former yer. For example (OR = Old Russian; R = Russian):
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