where follows , , , , or , are pronounced with without palatalization or iotation: (seks — 'sex'), (model' — 'model'), (kafe — 'café'), (proekt — 'project'; here, the spelling is etymological: German Projekt was adopted from Latin proiectum, so the word is spelled with to reflect the original and not with as usual after vowels; but the pronunciation is counter-etymological: a hypercorrection that has become standard). But many other words are pronounced with : (syekta — 'sect'), (dyebyut — 'debut'). Proper names are sometimes written with after consonants: — 'Sam', — 'Pamela', — 'Mary', — 'Mao Zedong'; the use of after consonants is common in East Asian names and in English names with the sounds and , with some exceptions such as ('Jack') and ('Shannon'), since both and , in cases of ("zhe"), ("she") and ("tse"), follow consonants that are always hard (non-palatalized), yet usually prevails in writing. However, English names with the sounds , (if spelled in English), and after consonants are normally spelled with in Russian: — 'Betty', — 'Peter', — 'Lake Placid'. Pronunciation mostly remains unpalatalized, so — Russian rendering of the English name 'Peter' is pronounced differently from — colloquial Russian name of Saint Petersburg. , introduced by Karamzin in 1797 and made official in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education, marks a sound that historically developed from stressed . The written letter is optional; it is formally correct to write for both and . None of the several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the use of have stuck. Non-vocalized letters Hard sign The hard sign () acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding "soft vowel" (, but not ) from a preceding consonant, invoking implicit iotation of the vowel with a distinct glide. Today it is used mostly to separate a prefix ending with a hard consonant from the following root. Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, likely pronounced or . Until the 1918 reform, no written word could end in a consonant: those that end in a "hard" consonant in modern orthography then had a final . While is also a soft vowel, root-initial following a hard consonant is typically pronounced as . This is normally spelled (the hard counterpart to ) unless this vowel occurs at the beginning of a word, in which case