The hard sign is the 28th letter of the current alphabet, which immature minds often confuse with the soft one and do not understand where to write it. A solid sign does not mean any sound and in modern Russian performs an exclusively dividing function in the pronunciation of some words. This article will tell you about the spelling of a solid sign in words.
The meaning of the letter
The solid sign is one of the oldest letters of the Russian language, which has existed in Cyrillic graphics since the very appearance of the Russian alphabet, but at that time denoted a sound that in some roots could be pronounced as the sound “o”. And the solid sign at that time was called "er" and its spelling was somewhat different from the current one. But in the 20th century, a spelling reform took place, which changed the meaning of the pronunciation of this letter, and now the solid sign performs only a separating function, but despite this, it plays an equally important role in the Russian language and should not be forgotten either.
Spelling words with a hard sign
And now, in our time, there are a few elementary ruleshard-character spellings that aren't hard to remember at all:
- A solid sign is always written before the letters e, e, u, i. Thus, it is placed after a prefix if it ends in a consonant, for example: cringe; drive up.
- A solid sign is written in words of foreign origin, such as: adjutant; subject; object and others.
- In complex words, "ъ" also performs a separating function, where the above letters are at the beginning of the second root. An example is compound words - two-tiered, three-tiered).
Note: a solid sign is NOT put in abbreviated words, for example: state language, special worker and others.
Examples
Let's look at a few more solid-sign words so we don't get confused anymore.
So, for example, the words "shoot", "entrance", "immense", "present" belong to the first category (words with a prefix ending in a consonant).
And such words as "pan-European", "conjunctivitis", "disjunction", "injection" refer to words of foreign origin.
And finally, the words "three-tier", "four-capacity" are compound words, at the beginning of the second root of which are the letters "e", "e", "yu", "ya".
We conclude: in the words "quadrangular", "two-axle", "three-story", "two-aspect" a dividing solid sign is not written, since they use the letters "u", "o", "e", "a ", and before them a dividing solid sign is not put.
Be literate and neverforget about the rules of our native, mighty Russian language!
