Russian orthography
Russian orthography is an orthographic tradition formally considered to encompass spelling and punctuation. Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the models of French and German orthography.
The IPA transcription attempts to reflect vowel reduction when not under stress. The sounds that are presented are those of the standard language; other dialects may have noticeably different pronunciations for the vowels.
Spelling
Russian is written with a modern variant of the Cyrillic script. Russian spelling typically avoids arbitrary digraphs. Except for the use of hard and soft signs, which have no phonetic value in isolation but can follow a consonant letter, no phoneme is ever represented with more than one letter.Morphological principle
Under the morphological principle, the morphemes are attached without modification; the compounds may be further agglutinated. For example, the long adjective шарикоподшипниковый, sharikopodshipnikoviy , may be decomposed as follows :Note again that each component in the final production retains its basic form, despite the vowel reduction.
The phonetic assimilation of consonant clusters also does not usually violate the morphological principle of the spelling. For example, the decomposition of счастье is as follows:
Note the assimilation with - so that it represents the same sound as -. The spelling <щастие> was fairly common among the literati in the eighteenth century, but is usually frowned upon today.
Phonetic principle
The phonetic principle implies that:- all morphemes are written as they are pronounced in isolation, without vowel reduction, Church Slavonic style, or, more strictly, taking inflexion into account ;
- certain prefixes that end in a voiced consonant have that consonant devoiced to voicing assimilation. This may be reflected orthographically. For example, for the prefix/preposition без 'without':
- certain roots and prefixes occasionally have their vowel modified in individual cases to reflect historical changes in pronunciation, usually as a result of being unstressed or, conversely, stressed. In practice, this usually applies to -- changing to -- or , and alternations between the allophonic vowels and :
- borrowed words and foreign names are usually spelled as orthographic transcriptions, or, more precisely, mixed transcriptions-transliterations based mainly on original pronunciation but also on original spelling. In particular, double consonants are usually retained from original spelling when their pronunciation is not normally geminated. In addition, unpalatalized consonants are usually followed by rather than ; 19th-century linguists, such as Yakov Karlovich Grot, considered unpalatalized pronunciation of consonants before to be foreign to Russian, though this has now become the standard for many loanwords.
Etymological principle
The fact that Russian has retained much of its ancient phonology has made the historical or etymological principle less relevant. Because the spelling has been adjusted to reflect the changes in the pronunciation of the yers and to eliminate letters with identical pronunciation, the only systematic examples occur in some foreign words and in some of the inflectional endings, both nominal and verbal, which are not always written as they are pronounced. For example:Grammatical principle
The grammatical principle has become stronger in contemporary Russian. It specifies conventional orthographic forms to mark grammatic distinctions. Some of these rules are ancient, and could perhaps be considered etymological; some are based in part on subtle, and not necessarily universal, distinctions in pronunciation; and some are practically arbitrary. Some characteristic examples follow.For nouns ending in a sibilant -, -, -, -, a soft sign is appended in the nominative singular if the gender is feminine, and is not appended if masculine:
The past passive participle has a doubled --, while the same word used as an adjective has a single -- :
Prepositional phrases in which the literal meaning is preserved are written with the words separated; when used adverbially, especially if the meaning has shifted, they are usually written as a single word:
Punctuation
Basic symbols
The full stop , colon, semicolon, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, and ellipsis are equivalent in shape to the basic symbols of punctuation used for the common European languages, and follow the same general principles of usage.The colon is used exclusively as a means of introduction, and never, as in slightly archaic English, to mark a periodic pause intermediate in strength between the semicolon and the full stop .
Comma usage
The comma is used very liberally to mark the end of introductory phases, on either side of simple appositions, and to introduce all subordinate clauses. The English distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses does not exist:Hyphenation
The hyphen , and em dash are used to mark increasing levels of separation. The hyphen is put between components of a word, and the em-dash to separate words in a sentence, in particular to mark longer appositions or qualifications that in English would typically be put in parentheses, and as a replacement for a copula:In short sentences describing a noun in present tense :
Direct speech
are not used to mark paragraphed direct quotation, which is instead separated out by the em-dash :Quotation
Inlined direct speech and other quotation is marked at the first level by guillemets «», and by lowered and raised reversed double quotes at the second:Unlike American English, the period or other terminal punctuation is placed outside the quotation. As the example [|above] demonstrates, the quotes are often used to mark the names of entities introduced with the generic word.
Parenthetical expressions
These are introduced with the international symbol of parentheses . However, their use is typically restricted to pure asides, rather than, as in English, to mark apposition.Controversies
Spelling
As in many languages, the spelling was formerly quite more phonemic and less consistent. However, the influence of the major grammarians, from Meletius Smotrytsky to Lomonosov to Grot, ensured a more careful application of morphology and etymology.Today, the balance between the morphological and phonetic principles is well established. The etymological inflexions are maintained by tradition and habit, although their non-phonetic spelling has occasionally prompted controversial calls for reform. A primary area where the spelling is utterly inconsistent and therefore controversial is:
- the complexity of some of the grammatical principles, especially with respect to the strung-together, hyphenated, or disjoint writing of the constituent morphemes.
In the past, uncertainty abounded about which of the ordinary or iotated/palatalizing series of vowels to allow after the sibilant consonants , , , , , which, as mentioned above, are not standard in their hard/soft pairs. This problem, however, appears to have been resolved by applying the phonetic and grammatical principles to define a complicated though internally consistent set of spelling rules.
In 2000–2001, a minor revision of the 1956 codification was proposed. It met with public protest and has not been formally adopted.
1918 Bolshevik reform
Russian orthography was simplified by unifying several adjectival and pronominal inflections, conflating the letter ѣ with е, ѳ with ф, and і and ѵ with и. Additionally, the archaic mute yer became obsolete, including the ъ in final position following consonants. For instance, Рыбинскъ became Рыбинск.Examples:
- Сѣверо-Американскіе Соединенные Штаты to Северо-Американские Соединённые Штаты – The United States of America
- Россія to Россия
- Петроградъ to Петроград
- раіонъ to район
- мараѳонъ to марафон
- дѣти to дети
- Іисусъ Христосъ to ''Иисус Христос''
Practical implementation
Although occasionally praised by the Russian working class, the reform was unpopular amongst the educated people, religious leaders and many prominent writers, many of whom were oppositional to the new state. Furthermore, even the workers ridiculed the spelling reform at first, arguing it made the Russian language poorer and less elegant.
In this way, private publications could formally be printed using the old orthography. The decree forbade the retraining of people previously trained under the old norm. A given spelling was considered a misspelling only if it violated both the old and the new norms.
However, in practice, the Soviet government rapidly set up a monopoly on print production and kept a very close eye on the fulfillment of the edict. A common practice was the forced removal of not just the letters І, Ѳ, and Ѣ from printing offices, but also Ъ. Because of this, the usage of the apostrophe as a dividing sign became widespread in place of ъ, and came to be perceived as a part of the reform. People resisting the implementation of the new orthography were deemed enemies of the people and executed. Nonetheless, some academic printings came out in the old orthography up until 1929.