Russian alphabet
The Russian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Russian language.
The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants, ten vowels, a semivowel / consonant, and two modifier letters 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.Letters
Historic letters
Letters eliminated in 1917–18
| Letter | Cursive | Italics | Old name | IPA | Common transliteration | Similar Russian letter | Examples | No. | Unicode |
| Іі | і десятеричное | ,, | i | Like и or й | стихотворенія stikhotvoréniya "poems, poem" | 10 | U+0406 / U+0456 | ||
| Ѣѣ | ять | , | ě | Like е | Алексѣй Aleksěy Alexey | U+0462 / U+0463 | |||
| Ѳѳ | ѳита | ,, /θ/ | f | Like ф | орѳографія orfográfiya "orthography, spelling" | 9 | U+0472 / U+0473 | ||
| Ѵѵ | ижица | , | y or í | Usually like и, see [|below] | мѵро myro or míro "chrism " | 400 | U+0474 / U+0475 |
- і — Identical in pronunciation to, it was used exclusively immediately before other vowels and the and in the word and its derivatives, to distinguish it from the word .
- 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 theta, it was identical to in pronunciation, but it was used etymologically.
- ѵ — From the Greek upsilon, usually identical to in pronunciation, as in Byzantine Greek, it was used etymologically for Greek loanwords, like Latin Y ; 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 . For example, a Greek prefix originally spelled is now spelled in most cases and as a component in some compound words.
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 "yuses", "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 Paschal tables. The seventeenth-century usage of and survives in contemporary Church Slavonic, and the sounds in Polish.
- 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 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.
Consonants
Most consonants can represent both "soft" and "hard" consonant phonemes. 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 and do not change "softness" in the presence of other letters: are always hard; are always soft.
Vowels
The Russian alphabet contains 10 vowel letters. They are grouped into soft and hard vowels. The soft vowels,, either indicate a preceding palatalized consonant, or are iotated 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.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 . 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 or in compound words. In words that come from foreign languages in which iotated is uncommon or nonexistent, is usually written in the beginning of words and after vowels except , 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, моде́ль, кафе́, прое́кт. But many other words are pronounced with : се́кта, дебю́т.
Proper names are sometimes written with after consonants: Сэм — 'Sam', 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 and Ше́ннон, since both and, in cases of же, ше and це, follow consonants that are always hard, yet usually prevails in writing. However, English names with the sounds, 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 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" 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 unless this vowel occurs at the beginning of a word, in which case it remains. An alternation between the two letters can be seen with the pair без и́мени and безымя́нный and compound words.
Soft sign
The soft sign,, in most positions acts like a "silent front vowel" and indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized and the following vowel is iotated. This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian. For example, брат contrasts with брать . 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 Марья and Мария.When applied after stem-final always-soft or always-hard 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 cf. туш — both pronounced ;
- the imperative mood for some verbs;
- the infinitives of some verbs ;
- the second person for non-past verbs ; and
- some adverbs and particles.