Russian alphabet

 ( Alphabet ) 

The Russian alphabet (, or , more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language.

The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ), ten vowels (, , , , , , , , , ), a semivowel / consonant (), and two or "signs" (, ) that alter pronunciation of a preceding consonant or a following vowel.

---

History Russian alphabet is derived from the Cyrillic script, which was invented in the 9th century to capture accurately the phonology of the first Slavic literary language, Old Church Slavonic. The early Cyrillic alphabet was adapted to Old East Slavic from Old Church Slavonic and was used in Kievan Rus' from the 10th century onward to write what would become the modern Russian language. The last major reform of Russian orthography took place in 1917–1918.

(2017). 9781107095885, Cambridge University Press. . ISBN 9781107095885

---

Letters

An alternative form of the letter De (Д д) closely resembles the Greek letter delta (Δ δ).

An alternative form of the letter El (Л л) closely resembles the Greek letter lambda (Λ λ).

---

Historic letters

---

Letters eliminated in 1917–18

• і — Identical in pronunciation to , it was used exclusively immediately before other vowels and the ("Short I") (for example, , 'patriarch') and in the word ('world') and its derivatives, to distinguish it from the word ('peace') (the two words are actually etymologically cognate. and not arbitrarily ).
• ѣ — Originally had a distinct sound, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, it had become identical in pronunciation to in the standard language. Since its elimination in 1918, it has remained a political symbol of the old orthography.
• ѳ — From the Greek alphabet theta, it was identical to in pronunciation, but it was used etymologically (for example, "Theodore" became "Fyodor").
• ѵ — From the Greek alphabet upsilon, usually identical to in pronunciation, as in Medieval Greek, it was used etymologically for Greek loanwords, like Latin Y (as in synod, myrrh); by 1918, it had become very rare. In spellings of the eighteenth century, it was also used after some vowels, where it has since been replaced with or (rarely) . For example, a Greek prefix originally spelled (equivalent to English ) is now spelled in most cases and as a component in some compound words.

19th century Russian alphabet (Körner).jpg|(Körner, 1895) 19th century Russian alphabet (Motti).jpg|(Motti, 1890) 19th century Russian alphabet (Fuchs).jpg|(Fuchs, 1888) 19th century Russian alphabet (Moser).jpg|(Moser, 1888) 19th century Russian alphabet (Reiff).jpg|(Reiff, 1883) 19th century Russian alphabet (Boltz).jpg|(Boltz, 1880)

---

Letters eliminated before 1750

• corresponded to a more archaic pronunciation, already absent in East Slavic at the start of the historical period, but kept by tradition in certain words until the eighteenth century in secular writing and in Church Slavonic and Macedonian to the present day.
• and derived from Greek letters xi and psi. It was used etymologically, though inconsistently, in secular writing until the eighteenth century and more consistently to the present day in Church Slavonic.
• is the Greek letter omega, identical in pronunciation to . It was used in secular writing until the eighteenth century, but in the present day in Church Slavonic, it was mostly used to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise written identically.
• Two "", "big" and "small" , used to stand for nasalized vowels and . According to linguistic reconstruction, both became irrelevant for East Slavic phonology at the beginning of the historical period but were introduced along with the rest of the Cyrillic script. The iotated yuses, and , had largely vanished by the twelfth century. The uniotated continued to be used, etymologically, until the sixteenth century. Thereafter it was restricted to being a dominical letter in the Easter tables. The seventeenth-century usage of and survives in contemporary Church Slavonic, and the sounds (but not the letters) in Polish language.
• The letter was adapted to represent the iotated in the middle or end of a word; the modern letter is an adaptation of its cursive form of the seventeenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708.
• Until 1708, the iotated was written Iotified A at the beginning of a word. This distinction between and survives in Church Slavonic.

Although it is usually stated that the letters in the table above were eliminated in the typographical reform of 1708, reality is somewhat more complex. The letters were indeed originally omitted from the sample alphabet, printed in a western-style serif font, presented in Peter edict, along with the letters (replaced by ), and (the diacriticized letter was also removed), but were reinstated except and under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church in a later variant of the modern typeface (1710). Nonetheless, since 1735, the Russian Academy of Sciences began to use fonts without , and ; however, was sometimes used again since 1758.

Although praised by Western scholars and philosophers, it was criticized by clergy and many conservative scholars, who found the new standard too "Russified". Some even went as far as to refer to Peter as the Anti-Christ.Archived at Ghostarchive and the target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Wayback Machine:

---

Consonants

+Consonants !Either hard (default) or soft	Б, В, Г, Д, З, К, Л, М, Н, П, Р, С, Т, Ф, Х

Most consonants can represent both "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ) and "hard" consonant phonemes.Russian language course "Russo Sem Mestre" (Portuguese for Russian without Master), by Custódio Gomes Sobrinho If consonant letters are followed by vowel letters, the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is meant to follow "hard" consonants or "soft" consonants . A soft sign indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant without adding a vowel.

However, in modern Russian, six consonant phonemes do not have phonemically distinct "soft" and "hard" variants (except in foreign proper names) and do not change "softness" in the presence of other letters: are always hard; are always soft. (Before 1950, Russian linguists considered a semivowel rather than a consonant.)

---

Vowels

+Vowels !Hard	А	Э	Ы	О	У
Each row is roughly analogous to the Latin A, E, I, O, U.

The Russian alphabet contains 10 vowel letters. They are grouped into soft and hard vowels.Russian language course "Russo Sem Mestre" (Portuguese for Russian without Master), by Custódio Gomes Sobrinho The soft vowels, , either indicate a preceding palatalized consonant, or (with the exception of ) are iotated (pronounced with a preceding ) in all other cases. The IPA vowels shown are a guideline only and sometimes are realized as different sounds, particularly when unstressed. However, may be used in words of foreign origin without palatalization (), and is often realized as between soft consonants, such as in мяч ('toy ball').

---

Individual vowels

is an old [[Proto-Slavic]] close central vowel, thought to have been preserved better in modern Russian than in other Slavic languages. It was originally nasalized in certain positions: Old Russian камы ; Modern Russian камень  ('rock'). Its written form developed as follows:  +  →  → .
     

was introduced in 1708 to distinguish the non-iotated/non-palatalizing  from the iotated/palatalizing one. The original usage had been  for the uniotated ,  or  for the iotated, but  had dropped out of use by the sixteenth century. In native Russian words,  is found only at the beginnings of a few words э́тот/э́та/э́то 'this (is) (m./f./n.)', э́ти 'these', э́кий 'what a', э́дак/э́так 'that way', э́дакий/э́такий 'sort of', and interjections like эй 'hey') or in compound words (e.g., поэ́тому 'therefore' = по + этому, where этому is the dative case of этот). In words that come from foreign languages in which iotated  is uncommon or nonexistent (such as English),  is usually written in the beginning of words and after vowels except  (e.g., поэ́т, 'poet'), and  after  and consonants. However, the pronunciation is inconsistent. Many of these borrowed words, especially monosyllables, words ending in  and many words where  follows , , , ,  or , are pronounced with  without palatalization or iotation: секс (''seks'' — 'sex'), моде́ль (''model''' — 'model'), кафе́ (''kafe'' — 'café'), прое́кт (''proekt'' — 'project'; here, the spelling is etymological: German ''Projekt'' was adopted from Latin ''proiectum'', so the word is spelled with  to reflect the original  and not with  as usual after vowels; but the pronunciation is counter-etymological: a [[hypercorrection]] that has become standard). But many other words are pronounced with : се́кта (''syekta'' — 'sect'), дебю́т (''dyebyut'' — 'debut').
     

Proper names are sometimes written with after consonants: Сэм — 'Sam', Пэме́ла — 'Pamela', Мэ́ри — 'Mary', Ма́о Цзэду́н — 'Mao Zedong'; the use of after consonants is common in East Asian names and in English names with the sounds and , with some exceptions such as Джек ('Jack') and Ше́ннон ('Shannon'), since both and , in cases of же ("zhe"), ше ("she") and це ("tse"), follow consonants that are always hard (non-palatalized), yet usually prevails in writing. However, English names with the sounds , (if spelled in English) and after consonants are normally spelled with in Russian: Бе́тти — 'Betty', Пи́тер — 'Peter', Лейк-Плэ́сид — 'Lake Placid'. Pronunciation mostly remains unpalatalized, so Пи́тер — Russian rendering of the English name 'Peter' is pronounced differently from Пи́тер — is a colloquial Russian name of Saint Petersburg.

, introduced by Nikolay Karamzin in 1797 and made official in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education, marks a sound that historically developed from stressed . The written letter is optional; it is formally correct to write for both and . None of the several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the use of have stuck.

---

Non-vocalized letters

---

Hard sign The hard sign () acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding "soft vowel" (, but not ) from a preceding consonant, invoking implicit iotation of the vowel with a distinct glide. Today it is used mostly to separate a prefix ending with a hard consonant from the following root. Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, likely pronounced or . Until the 1918 reform, no written word could end in a consonant: those that end in a "hard" consonant in modern orthography then had a final .

While is also a soft vowel, root-initial following a hard consonant is typically pronounced as . This is normally spelled (the hard counterpart to ) unless this vowel occurs at the beginning of a word, in which case it remains . An alternation between the two letters (but not the sounds) can be seen with the pair без и́мени ('without name', which is pronounced ) and безымя́нный ('nameless', which is pronounced ). This spelling convention, however, is not applied with certain loaned prefixes such as in the word панислами́зм — , 'Pan-Islamism') and compound words (e.g., госизме́на — , '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 ж, ш, ц) and the following vowel (if present) is iotated (including in loans). This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian. For example, брат ('brother') contrasts with брать ('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 Мар ья and Мар ия ('Mary').See Polish Maria as a given name but Maryja in context of the Virgin Mary.

When applied after stem-final always-soft (ч, щ, but not й) or always-hard (ж, ш, but not ц) 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., тушь ('India ink', feminine) cf. туш ('flourish after a toast', masculine) — both pronounced ;
• the imperative mood for some verbs;
• the infinitives of some verbs (with -чь ending);
• the second person for non-past verbs (with -шь ending); and
• 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 language and German language that contain such a sound in the original language. In well-established terms, such as галлюцинация ('hallucination'), this is written with and pronounced with , while newer terms use , pronounced with , such as хобби ('hobby'). Similarly, words originally with in their source language are either pronounced with , as in the name Тельма ('Thelma') or, if borrowed early enough, with or , as in the names Фёдор ('Theodore') and Мат ве́й ('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 language form .

---

Numeric values The numerical values correspond to the Greek numerals, with being used for digamma, for qoppa, and for sampi. The system was abandoned for secular purposes in 1708, after a transitional period of a century or so; it continues to be used in Church Slavonic, while general Russian texts use Indo-Arabic numerals and Roman numerals.

---

Diacritics The Cyrillic alphabet and Russian spelling generally employ fewer than those used in other European languages written with the Latin alphabet. The only diacritic, in the proper sense, is the acute accent  (Russian: знак ударения 'mark of stress'), which marks stress on a vowel, as it is done in Spanish and Greek. (Unicode has no for the accented letters; they are instead produced by suffixing the unaccented letter with .) Although Russian word stress is often unpredictable and can fall on different syllables in different forms of the same word, the diacritic accent is used only in dictionaries, children's books, resources for foreign-language learners, the defining entry (in bold) in articles on Russian Wikipedia, or on distinguished only by stress (for instance, за́мок 'castle' vs. замо́к 'lock'). Rarely, it is also used to specify the stress in uncommon foreign words, and in poems with unusual stress used to fit the meter.

The letter is a special variant of the letter , which is not always distinguished in written Russian, but the umlaut-like sign has no other uses. Stress on this letter is never marked with a diacritic, as it is always stressed (except in some compounds and loanwords).

Both and the letter have completely separated from and . has been used since the 16th century (except that it was removed in 1708, but reinstated in 1735). Since then, its usage has been mandatory. It was formerly considered a diacriticized letter, but in the 20th century, it came to be considered a separate letter of the Russian alphabet. It was classified as a "semivowel" by 19th- and 20th-century grammarians, but since the 1970s, it has been considered a consonant letter.

---

Frequency The frequency of characters in a Text corpus of written Russian was found to be as follows:

1		11.18%		By comparison, 'e' in English appears about 13% in texts.
2		8.75%	Foreign words sometimes use Е rather than Э, even if it is pronounced e instead of ye. In addition, Ё is often replaced by Е; this makes Е even more common.	'T' appears about 9.1%
3		7.64%		'A' appears about 8.2%
4		7.09%		'O' appears about 7.5%
5	Н	6.78%	The most common consonant in the Russian alphabet.	'I' appears about 7%
6	Т	6.09%
7	С	4.97%
8	Л	4.96%
9	В	4.38%
10	Р	4.23%
11	К	3.30%
12	М	3.17%
13	Д	3.09%
14	П	2.47%
15		2.36%
16		2.22%
17	Б	2.01%
18		1.96%
19	Ь	1.84%
20	Г	1.72%
21	З	1.48%
22	Ч	1.40%
23	Й	1.21%
24	Ж	1.01%
25	Х	0.95%
26	Ш	0.72%
27		0.47%
28	Ц	0.39%
29		0.36%	Foreign words sometimes use Е rather than Э, even if it is pronounced e instead of ye. In addition, Ё is often replaced by Е; this makes Е even more common.	K : 0.77%
30	Щ	0.30%		J : 0.15%
31	Ф	0.21%	The least common consonant in the Russian alphabet.	X : 0.15%
32		0.20%	In written Russian, is often replaced by .	Q : 0.095%
33	Ъ	0.02%	used to be a very common letter in the Russian alphabet. This is because before the 1918 reform, any word ending with a non-palatalized consonant was written with a final Ъ — e.g., pre-1918 вотъ vs. post-reform вот. The reform eliminated the use of Ъ in this context, leaving it the least common letter in the Russian alphabet.	'Z' : 0.074%

---

Keyboard layout Microsoft Windows keyboard layout for personal computers is as follows:

However, there are several variations of so-called "phonetic keyboards" that are often used by non-Russians, where pressing an English letter key will type the Russian letter with a similar sound (A → А, S → С, D → Д, F → Ф, etc.).

---

Letter names Until approximately the year 1900, mnemonic names inherited from Church Slavonic were used for the letters. They are given here in the pre-1918 orthography of the post-1708 civil alphabet.

The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: "The names letters that make up the Slavonic alphabet don't represent a meaning at all. Аз, буки, веди, глаголь, добро etc. are individual words, chosen just for their initial sound". However, since the names of the first few letters of the Slavonic alphabet seem to form readable text, attempts have been made to compose meaningful snippets of text from groups of consecutive letters for the rest of the alphabet. Here is one such attempt to "decode" the message:

"I know letters"

"To speak is a beneficence" or "The word is property"

"Live, while working heartily, people of Earth, in the manner people should obey"

"try to understand the Universe (the world that is around)"

"be committed to your word" 9785224024384, ОЛМА Медиа Групп. . ISBN 9785224024384

"The knowledge is fertilized by the Creator, knowledge is the gift of God"

"Try harder, to understand the Light of the Creator"

In this attempt, only lines 1, 2 and 5 somewhat correspond to real meanings of the letters' names, while "translations" in other lines seem to be fabrications or fantasies. For example, "покой" ("rest" or "apartment") does not mean "the Universe", and "ферт" does not have any meaning in Russian or other Slavic languages (there are no words of Slavic origin beginning with "f" at all). The last line contains only one translatable word — "червь" ("worm"), which, however, was not included in the "translation".

---

See also

• Bulgarian alphabet
• Computer russification
• Cyrillic alphabets
• Cyrillic script
• Ukrainian Latin alphabet
• Greek alphabet
• Montenegrin alphabet
• List of Cyrillic digraphs and trigraphs
• Reforms of Russian orthography
• Romanization of Russian
• Russian Braille
• Russian cursive (handwritten letters)
• Russian manual alphabet
• Russian Morse code
• Russian orthography
• Russian phonology
• Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic
• Serbian Cyrillic alphabet
• Yoficator

---

Notes

---

Bibliography

• Ivan G. Iliev. "Kurze Geschichte des kyrillischen Alphabets". Plovdiv. 2015.
• Ivan G. Iliev. "Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet".

Post Comment