In one of the latest xorg versions, which appeared around January-February this year, some changes have crept into the phonetic layout, made by someone who clearly never thought about the average user and wanted to turn phonetic into BDS. The changes consist of introducing the upper and lower quotation marks instead of <>, a paragraph sign instead of &, and a euro sign instead of ^.
To fix these atrocities, add the following lines to ~/.bashrc:
xmodmap -e “keycode 16 = 7 ampersand 7 ampersand”
xmodmap -e “keycode 12 = 3 numbersign 3 numbersign”
xmodmap -e “keycode 15 = 6 asciicircum 6 asciicircum”
xmodmap -e “keycode 20 = minus underscore minus underscore”
xmodmap -e “keycode 59 = comma less comma less”
xmodmap -e “keycode 60 = period greater period greater”
Then log out and log back in to the system, and you should have your old symbol layout back.
P.S. There is one more change: instead of capital ь (small yer, Latin x), ѝ (i with a grave accent) has been put there, which I think is useful, so I haven’t reverted it in the changes above.