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Russian alphabet
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The modern Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. It was introduced into Kievan Rus' at the time of its conversion to Christianity (988), or, if certain archeological finds are correctly dated, at a slightly earlier date.
The alphabet as shown here is the printed form. Handwritten Russian letters can look significantly different.
The names of the letters1. Until approximately 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 great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: "The letters constituting the Slavonic alphabet do not produce any sense. ??, ????, ????, ???????, ????? etc. are separate words, chosen just for their initial sound". But since the names of the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet seem to form text, attempts were made to compose sensible text from all letters 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 the Earth, in the manner people should obey" | | ??????? ??? ?? ????? | "try to understand the Universe (the world that is around)" | | ??? ????? ?????? | "carry the knowledge ("word" here refers to "knowledge") firmly" | | ?? ???? ??? | "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 words only in two first lines somewhat correspond to real meanings of the letters' names, while "translations" in other lines seem to be fabrications or fantasies. For example, "?????" ("rest" or "apartment") doesn't mean "the Universe", and "????" doesn't have any meaning in Russian or other Slavonic languages (there are no words of Slavonic origin beginning with "f" at all). The last line contains only one translatable word - "?????" ("worm"), which, however, was not included in the "translation".
Another version of "the message", incorporating the letters phased out by mid-1750s, reads:
"?(?)?? ????? ????? ????????? - ????? ????. ????? ??? (??) ????? ????? ? ??????? ?????? ??????? ???? ? ????????, ????? (?) ?????? ???????? ?????? ???? ????????? (?) ???????? ?????, ???? ???????, ???? (??? ?????) (??)????? ???? ??????? ? ?? ??????? ?????? ?????????? ?????? ????? ? ????"
Transcribed into English language Roman letters is:
A(v)sye bukvy vyedaya glagolit' - dobro yest'. Zhivyet zlo (na) zyemlye vyechno i kazhdomu lyudinu myslit' nado o pokayaniyi, ryech'yu (i) slovom tverdit' uchyeniye vyery Khristovoy (v) Tsarstviye Bozhiye, chashchye sheptat', shchtob (vsye bukvy) (vz)yatiyem etim usvoyit' i po zakonam bozh'im stremit'sya pisat' slova i zhit
Which can be translated as:
"Knowing all these letters renders speech a virtue. Evil lives on Earth eternally, and each person must think of repentance, with speech and word making firm in their mind the faith in Christ and the Kingdom of God. Whisper [the letters] frequently to make them yours by this repetition in order to write and live according to laws of God."
The non-vocalized letters 2. The hard sign is used to separate prefixes from a succeeding iotated vowel. Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, but likely or
3. The soft sign indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized. This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian. For example, ???? ('brother') contrasts with ????? ('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 or . There are still some remains of this ancient reading in modern Russian, in the co-existing versions of the same name, read differently, such as in ????? and ????? (Mary).
The vowels 4. The vowels indicate a preceding palatal consonant and with the exception of are iotated (pronounced with a preceding ) when written at the beginning of a word or following another vowel (initial was iotated until the nineteenth century). The IPA vowels shown are a guideline only and sometimes are realized as different sounds, particularly when unstressed. However, is used in words of foreign origin without palatalization and indicate . Which words this applies to must be learned (generally to avoid using after a consonant), and is often realized as between soft consonants, such as in ???, ('toy ball').
5. is an old Common Slavonic tense intermediate vowel, thought to have been preserved better in modern Russian than in other Slavic languages. It was originally nasalized in certain positions: OR ???? R ?????? ('rock'). Its written form developed as follows: ? + ? > ?i > ?.
6. 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 words, but otherwise it may be found elsewhere, such as when spelling out English or other foreign names, or in words of foreign origin such as the brand-name Aeroflot (???????t).
7. , introduced by Karamzin in 1797, marks a sound that has historically developed from under stress, a process that continues today. The letter is optional (in writing, not in pronunciation): 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.
Letters eliminated in 1918 8. ("Decimal I"), identical in pronunciation to , was used exclusively immediately in front of 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 homonyms).
9. <> ("Fita"), from the Greek theta, was identical to in pronunciation, but was used etymologically (for example, ????? "Theodore").
10. <> ("Yat") originally had a distinct sound, but by the middle of the eighteenth century 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.
11. <> ("Izhitsa"), from the Greek upsilon, was identical to in pronunciation, as in Byzantine Greek, but was used etymologically; though by 1918 it had become very rare.
Letters in disuse by 175012. <> and <> are Greek letters xi and psi, used etymologically though inconsistently in secular writing until the eighteenth century, and more consistently to the present day in Church Slavonic.
13. <> is the Greek letter omega, identical in pronunciation to , used in secular writing until the eighteenth century, but to the present day in Church Slavonic, mostly to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise written identically.
14. <> 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 to the present day.
15. The yuses had become, according to linguistic reconstruction, irrelevant for East Slavic phonology already at the beginning of the historical period, but were introduced along with the rest of the Cyrillic alphabet. The letters <> 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 <> (see next note) survives in contemporary Church Slavonic.
16. 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.
17. Until 1708, the iotated was written at the beginning of a word. This distinction between <> and survives in Church Slavonic.
18. Although it is usually stated that the letters labelled "fallen into disuse by the eighteenth century" 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's edict, along with the modern letter , but were reinstated under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church in a later variant of the modern typeface. Nonetheless, they fell completely out of use in secular writing by 1750.
Numeric values 19. The numerical values correspond to the Greek numerals, with <> being used for digamma, for koppa, 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.
Keyboard layoutRussian keyboard layout for Microsoft Windows computers:
See also
External links
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