into disuse in the standard language) 'way-mark' (now ) 'mole cricket', 'mole rat' (now ) Loanwords from Church Slavonic reintroduced between a (historically) soft consonant and a hard one, creating a few new minimal pairs: Russian spelling does not normally distinguish stressed and following a soft consonant (and in some cases also following the unpaired consonants ), writing both as . However, dictionaries notate as when pronounced as . This sound change also occurred in Belarusian as seen in the word for "flax": Belarusian and Russian . Vowel reduction Modern Russian has extensive reduction of unstressed vowels, with the following mergers: original unstressed and following a hard consonant are merged as (pronounced or , depending on position) original unstressed and following a hard consonant are merged as , or as if is considered a phoneme (pronounced ) original unstressed , , following a soft consonant are merged as (all are pronounced ) The underlying vowel resurfaces when stressed in related forms or words, cf. (baldá) "sledgehammer", with genitive plural (bald) , vs. (kormá) , with genitive plural (korm) . The spelling consistently reflects the underlying vowel, even in cases where the vowel never surfaces as stressed in any words or forms (e.g. the first syllables of (xorošó) "well (adverb)" and (sapožók) "boot") and hence the spelling is purely etymological. See Vowel reduction in Russian for more details. There are exceptions to the rule given above: for example, "video" is pronounced as rather than . Consonants Consonant cluster simplification Simplification of Common Slavic and to : Common Slavonic "soap" > Russian: (mylo) (cf. Polish ) Consonant clusters created by the loss of yers were sometimes simplified, but are still preserved in spelling: (zdravstvujte) "hello" (first v rarely pronounced; such a pronunciation might indicate that the speaker intends to give the word its archaic meaning "be healthy") (sérdce) "heart" (d not pronounced), but d is pronounced in the genitive plural (sérdec) ) (solnce) "sun" (l not pronounced), but l is pronounced in adjectival (sólnečnyj) "solar" and diminutive (sólnyško) "small sun, sweetheart" Development of palatalized consonants Around the tenth century, Russian may have already had paired coronal fricatives and sonorants so that could have contrasted with , but any possible contrasts were limited to specific environments. Otherwise, palatalized consonants appeared allophonically before front vowels. When the yers were lost, the palatalization initially triggered by high vowels remained, creating minimal pairs like ('given') and