Between a consonant and a vowel, the soft sign bears also a function of "iotation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are iotated (compare Russian льют '(they) pour/cast' and лют '(he is) fierce'). The feature, quite consistent with Russian orthography, promulgated a confusion between palatalization and iotation, especially because usually precedes so-called "soft vowels". Combinations (ya), (ye), (yo) and (yu) give iotated vowels, like corresponding vowel letters in isolation (and word-initially), and unlike its use immediately after a consonant letter in which palatalization can occur but not iotation. In those cases, may be considered as a sign indicating that a vowel after it is pronounced separately from the previous consonant, but that is the case neither for (yi) nor for (yo), because these vowels are not iotated in isolation. The latter case, though, is rarely used in Russian (only in loanwords such as ) and can be seen as a replacement of phonetically identical , which gets rid of an "inconvenient" letter . In Ukrainian and Bulgarian, the spelling indicates palatalization, not iotation.