Are й and ь exceptions to letters named after pronunciation? [closed]

Question

Through my studies I have come across the letter 'Ь' for soft sign and the letter 'й' for iot. I wonder now if there are more named letters within the Ukrainian language.

Answer 1

Every letter has a name.

But the fact is that names of the most of the Ukrainian letters simply resemble their pronunciations more or less:

• Names of vowel-like letters exactly resemble their pronunciation as when the letter is used in the beginning of the word, e.g.: а is called а /ɑ/, я is called я /jɑ/, etc.

• Names of consonant-like letters are typically extended with а /ɑ/ (put after the corresponding consonant) or е /ɛ/ (put after or before the consonant), e.g:

  • к (produces /k/ sound) is called ка /kɑ/;
  • л (produces /l/ sound) is called ел /ɛl/;
  • з (produces /z/ sound) is called зе /zɛ/.

So far the only Ukrainian letters that don't follow that scheme are й (produces /j/ sound, but is called йот /jɔt/ (not /jɑ/, /ɛj/ or /jɛ/ as one may expect when looking on the other consonants)) and ь (produces no sound (modifies preceding letter's sound), is called м'який знак /mjɑˈkɪj ˈznɑk/, which literally means “soft sign”).

Answer 2

Just for notice to answer of Sasha and about not obviously things.

Sasha writed about their sound for reading alphabet. What is it meaning? When to write here is just к — not ка, but when reading, here is ка. So, each letter is already name themself.

Another thing, Ukrainian has genders, and each name of letters is in neuter gender but has not cases. So, correct writing is велике к.

Sasha writed about variation sounds. But here is nothing hard, because currently sounds are just coppied from Classic Latin, even for different sounds but with similar way of pronunciation. Let’s look.

   Same         Different Sound
C  Sound  L     C       L

Б   be    B  →  В  we         — from Greek beta
Г   ɦе    G  →  Ц  tse  C  ke — from Greek gamma
Ґ   ɡe    ┘     Ч  tʃe  ┘ 
Д   de    D     Х  xa   H  ha
К   ka    K     З  ze   Z  dzeta
Л   el    L
M   em    M     Only Cyrrilic just remember
Н   en    N     Ж  ʒe
П   pe    P     Ш  ʃа   ┐
Р   er    R     Щ  ʃtʃa ┘
С   es    S
Т   te    T     Only with Greek
Ф   еf    F     Й  jot  J      — from Greek iota

Only one consonant left — й which represent the sound j and short i which came from i which is from Greek iota. Obviously, we cann’t sound that as as ja or je, because in this case we get я and є. So we and others Slovs (for Cyrillic ј or j if Latin script) use just Greek name here.

Letter ь is even non-letter but sign, that is why is called as soft sign. For example, Serbian remove ь and created letters as љ, њ. For Ukrainian need many another letters, so ь is saved here.