I read in the article film critic: "When we had a reform of the Russian alphabet after the revolution, who could have predicted that the disappearance of a hard sign in the ending of masculine words would lead to a weakening of the masculine principle in real life? But this is a fact, as later psycholinguistic studies have shown" (Novaya Gazeta. 2003. N 88). I read and wonder: I have seen and heard a lot of statements made by so-called naive native speakers (i.e., people who speak the language, and sometimes speak it brilliantly, but do not have knowledge of it), but that such a statement should be made... The spelling reform had two components: the reform of the alphabet (several letters were removed from it: yat, fitu, izhitsa, etc.) and the actual spelling (spelling). A solid sign was left as a dividing line (exit, detour), removing it from the end of words not only masculine, but also feminine and neuter (aunt-aunts, wives - wives, windows-windows, villages-villages), because at the absolute end of words this letter is already 800 (eight hundred!) years didn't make any sound. But she regularly spent first parchment, and then writing and printing paper, and wasted the labor of typesetters with manual typing. Someone unsuccessfully called this letter a hard sign. In all editions of the famous spelling guide by academician Ya. K. Grot (hence the name Grotovskaya orthography), which were also published in page 126 at the beginning of the XX century, this letter was called er (the Grotto, of course, printed er ). What kind of firmness did it signify when it was carefully placed after the letter h, which in the literary language and in most local dialects denoted a soft consonant sound: kalach, plach, ball, executioner ? Solid sign - a false orienting term. Perhaps this circumstance provoked the author of the article to make his more than bold statement, which was reproduced in mass circulation. The author did not explain what he means by "masculinity in real life" an ... Read more