by and respectively): borrowed words are usually spelled as transliterations, often ignoring actual pronunciation until they become more fully nativized. This is why double consonants are usually retained from original spelling when their pronunciation is not normally geminated. In addition, unpalatalized consonants are usually followed by rather than (e.g. кафе ,'café'); 19th-century linguists, such as Yakov Karlovich Grot, considered unpalatalized pronunciation of consonants before to be foreign to Russian, though this has now become the standard for many loanwords. Pronunciation may also deviate from normal phonological rules. For example, unstressed (spelled ) is usually pronounced or , but радио ('radio') is pronounced , with an unstressed final . Etymological principle The fact that Russian has retained much of its ancient phonology has made the historical or etymological principle (dominant in languages like English, French, and Irish) less relevant. Because the spelling has been adjusted to reflect the changes in the pronunciation of the yers and to eliminate letters with identical pronunciation, the only systematic examples occur in some foreign words and in some of the inflectional endings, both nominal and verbal, which are not always written as they are pronounced. For example: Grammatical principle The grammatical principle has become stronger in contemporary Russian. It specifies conventional orthographic forms to mark grammatic distinctions (gender, participle vs. adjective, and so on). Some of these rules are ancient, and could perhaps be considered etymological; some are based in part on subtle, and not necessarily universal, distinctions in pronunciation; and some are practically arbitrary. Some characteristic examples follow. For nouns ending in a sibilant - , - , - , - , a soft sign is appended in the nominative singular if the gender is feminine, and is not appended if masculine: Neither of the aforementioned consonants has phonemically distinct palatalized and unpalatalized variants. Hence, the use of in these examples is not to indicate a different pronunciation, but to help distinguish different grammatical genders. A common noun ending in a consonant without - is masculine while a noun ending in - is often feminine (though there are some masculine nouns ending in a "soft" consonant, with the - marking a different pronunciation). Though based on common ancient etymology, by which a hard sign ъ was appended to masculine nouns before 1918, both symbols having once been pronounced as ultra-short or reduced yers, the modern rule is nevertheless grammatical, because its application has been