it remains . An alternation between the two letters (but not the sounds) can be seen with the pair ('without name', which is pronounced ) and ('nameless', which is pronounced ). This spelling convention, however, is not applied with certain loaned prefixes such as in the word – , 'Pan-Islamism') and compound (multi-root) words (e.g. – , 'high treason'). Soft sign The soft sign () in most positions acts like a "silent front vowel" and indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized (except for always-hard ) and the following vowel (if present) is iotated (including in loans). This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian. For example, ('brother') contrasts with ('to take'). The original pronunciation of the soft sign, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short fronted reduced vowel but likely pronounced or . There are still some remnants of this ancient reading in modern Russian, e.g. in co-existing versions of the same name, read and written differently, such as and ('Mary'). When applied after stem-final always-soft (, but not ) or always-hard (, but not ) consonants, the soft sign does not alter pronunciation, but has grammatical significance: the feminine marker for singular nouns in the nominative and accusative; e.g. ('India ink', feminine) cf. ('flourish after a toast', masculine) – both pronounced ; the imperative mood for some verbs; the infinitives of some verbs (with ending); the second person for non-past verbs (with ending); some adverbs and particles. Treatment of foreign sounds Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions for sounds not present in Russian. For example, while Russian has no , there are a number of common words (particularly proper nouns) borrowed from languages like English and German that contain such a sound in the original language. In well-established terms, such as ('hallucination'), this is written with and pronounced with , while newer terms use , pronounced with , such as ('hobby'). Similarly, words originally with in their source language are either pronounced with , as in the name ('Thelma') or, if borrowed early enough, with or , as in the names ('Theodore') and ('Matthew'). For the affricate, which is common in the Asian countries that were part of the Russian Empire and the USSR, the letter combination is used: this is often transliterated into English either as or the Dutch form . Numeric values The numerical values