Soft sign

The soft sign (Ь, ь, italics Ь, ь; Russian: мягкий знак Russian pronunciation: [ˈmʲæxʲkʲɪj znak]) also known as the front yer or front er, 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 ‹ъ›, the vowel phoneme that it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels.

In the modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems (all East Slavic languages and Bulgarian and Church Slavic), it does not represent an individual sound but indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant.

It was also used in the Soviet Union in the Latinized Karelian alphabet, made official in 1931 and used until re-Cyrillicization of Karelian in 1937.

Uses and meanings

Palatalization sign

The soft sign is normally written after a consonant and indicates its softening (palatalization). Less commonly, the soft sign just has a grammatically determined usage with no phonetic meaning (like Russian: туш 'flourish after a toast' and тушь 'India ink', both pronounced [tuʂ] but different in grammatical gender and declension). In East Slavic languages and some other Slavic languages (such as Bulgarian), there are some consonants that do not have phonetically different palatalized forms but corresponding letters still admit the affixing soft sign.

Soft!

Soft! is a novel by British writer Rupert Thomson, written in 1998 London.

Apparently acting as participants in a sleep experiment, the protagonists of this novel find themselves the unwitting word-of-mouth advertisers of 'Kwench!', a new soft drink.

Soft (band)

Soft is an American indie rock band from New York City.

History

Soft formed in Brooklyn in 2003, but the group did not begin performing live until more than a year afterwards; for this reason, they were not well known on the New York music scene despite receiving critical acclaim elsewhere. Prior to forming Soft, lead singer John Reineck had previously played in a band called The Siren Six! at the University of Minnesota, and spent a year in Osaka working for a noise music record label after college. The name "Soft" was given to the group by Mickey Madden from Maroon 5, who suggested it after the group opened for one of their shows. The group also opened for such acts as Kiss, Phantom Planet, Hot Chip, and Voxtrot. After releasing several EPs and an LP in Japan, the group's debut full-length, Gone Faded, was released on October 23, 2007. The band recorded a follow-up album in early 2008 with producer Chris Coady which was released in 2011 as Dogs.

Discography

Percent sign

The percent sign (%) is the symbol used to indicate a percentage, a number or ratio as a fraction of 100. Related signs include the permille (per thousand) sign ‰ and the permyriad (per ten thousand) sign ‱ (also known as a basis point), which indicate that a number is divided by one thousand or ten thousand respectively. Higher proportions use parts-per notation.

Correct style

Spacing

English style guides prescribe writing the number and percent sign without any space between. However, the International System of Units and ISO 31-0 standard prescribe a space between the number and percent sign, in line with the general practice of using a non-breaking space between a numerical value and its corresponding unit of measurement.

Other languages have other rules for spacing in front of the percent sign:

Ampersand

The ampersand is the logogram "&", representing the conjunction word "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et, Latin for "and".

Etymology

The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and per se & (and)", meaning "and intrinsically the word and (represented by the symbol &)".

Traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was repeated with the Latin expression per se ("by itself"). This habit was useful in spelling where a word or syllable was repeated after spelling; e.g. "d, o, g—dog" would be clear but simply saying "a—a" would be confusing without the clarifying "per se" added. It was also common practice to add the "&" sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the Latin et or later in English as and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z, and per se and". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term had entered common English usage by 1837. However, in contrast to the 26 letters, the ampersand does not represent a speech sound—although other characters that were dropped from the English alphabet did, such as the Old English thorn, wynn, and eth.

Sign (album)

Sign is the seventh album by Clock DVA, released on August 3, 1993 through Contempo Records.

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Robert Baker and Adi Newton. 

Personnel

References

External links