U+044C Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign
U+044C was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block Cyrillic in the Basic Multilingual Plane.
This character is a Lowercase Letter and is mainly used in the Cyrillic script. Its uppercase variant is Cyrillic Capital Letter Soft Sign and its titlecase variant is Cyrillic Capital Letter Soft Sign.
The glyph is not a composition. Its width in East Asian texts is determined by its context. It can be displayed wide or narrow. In bidirectional text it is written from left to right. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+044C forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it. The glyph can be confused with one other glyph.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The soft sign (Ь ь; italics: Ь ь) is a letter in the Cyrillic script that is used in various Slavic languages. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short or reduced front vowel. However, over time, the specific vowel sound it denoted was largely eliminated and merged with other vowel sounds.
In most contemporary Slavic Cyrillic writing systems, such as those used in East Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) and Church Slavic, the soft sign does not represent a distinct sound on its own. Instead, it serves as an indicator of palatalization of the preceding consonant. In the Bulgarian language, it is only used to mark the palatalization of the preceding consonant when in front of the letter o, causing the combination ьо (/ʲo/). An example of this is the word гьол (/gʲol/).
Palatalization is a linguistic process in which the middle of the tongue moves closer to the hard palate while pronouncing a consonant. It affects the pronunciation of the preceding consonant by giving it a palatal quality or causing it to become a palatal consonant. The soft sign acts as a visual marker to show that the consonant before it is palatalized.
For example, in Russian, the soft sign is often used after consonants to indicate palatalization. It affects the pronunciation of the preceding consonant and can change the sound of words. The specific effect varies depending on the consonant it follows. In other Slavic languages where the soft sign is used, a similar palatalization function is observed.
It may also be used as a superscript. (ь)
Representations
| System | Representation |
|---|---|
| Nº | 1100 |
| UTF-8 | D1 8C |
| UTF-16 | 04 4C |
| UTF-32 | 00 00 04 4C |
| URL-Quoted | %D1%8C |
| HTML hex reference | ь |
| Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake | ь |
| HTML named entity | ь |
| Encoding: BIG5 (hex bytes) | C7 E5 |
| Encoding: BIG5HKSCS (hex bytes) | C8 72 |
| Encoding: CP855 (hex bytes) | ED |
| Encoding: CP866 (hex bytes) | EC |
| Encoding: CP932 (hex bytes) | 84 8E |
| Encoding: CP949 (hex bytes) | AC EE |
| Encoding: CP950 (hex bytes) | C7 E5 |
| Encoding: CP1125 (hex bytes) | EC |
| Encoding: CP1251 (hex bytes) | FC |
| Encoding: EUC_JP (hex bytes) | A7 EE |
| Encoding: EUC_JIS_2004 (hex bytes) | A7 EE |
| Encoding: EUC_JISX0213 (hex bytes) | A7 EE |
| Encoding: EUC_KR (hex bytes) | AC EE |
| Encoding: GB2312 (hex bytes) | A7 EE |
| Encoding: GBK (hex bytes) | A7 EE |
| Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes) | A7 EE |
| Encoding: HZ (hex bytes) | 7E 7B 27 6E 7E 7D |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 27 6E 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_1 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 27 6E 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 27 6E 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2004 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 27 6E 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_3 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 27 6E 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_EXT (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 27 6E 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_KR (hex bytes) | 1B 24 29 43 0E 2C 6E 0F |
| Encoding: ISO8859_5 (hex bytes) | EC |
| Encoding: JOHAB (hex bytes) | DE EE |
| Encoding: KOI8_R (hex bytes) | D8 |
| Encoding: KOI8_T (hex bytes) | D8 |
| Encoding: KOI8_U (hex bytes) | D8 |
| Encoding: KZ1048 (hex bytes) | FC |
| Encoding: MAC_CYRILLIC (hex bytes) | FC |
| Encoding: PTCP154 (hex bytes) | FC |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JIS (hex bytes) | 84 8E |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JIS_2004 (hex bytes) | 84 8E |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JISX0213 (hex bytes) | 84 8E |
| Encoding: CP1025 (hex bytes) | B0 |
| Encoding: CP1123 (hex bytes) | B0 |
| LATEX | \cyrchar\cyrsftsn |
| Adobe Glyph List | afii10094 |
| Adobe Glyph List | softsigncyrillic |
| digraph | %' |
Related Characters
Confusables
Elsewhere
Complete Record
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 1.1 (1993) | |
| CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SOFT SIGN | |
| — | |
| Cyrillic | |
| Lowercase Letter | |
| Cyrillic | |
| Left To Right | |
| Not Reordered | |
| none | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| ✔ | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| ✘ | |
| Cyrillic Capital Letter Soft Sign | |
| Cyrillic Capital Letter Soft Sign | |
| Cyrillic Capital Letter Soft Sign | |
| Cyrillic Capital Letter Soft Sign | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| Any | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| ✘ | |
| None | |
| — | |
| NA | |
| Other | |
| — | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Yes | |
| Yes | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| Yes | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| Yes | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Lower | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Alphabetic Letter | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| None | |
| ambiguous | |
| Not Applicable | |
| — | |
| No_Joining_Group | |
| Non Joining | |
| Alphabetic | |
| none | |
| not a number | |
| Cyrillic Small Letter Soft Sign | |
| R |