Russian Alphabet - Learning Russian Alphabet

The Russian alphabet (Russian: русский алфавит, tr. rússkij alfavít; IPA: [ˈruskʲɪj ɐlfɐˈvʲit]) uses letters from the Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.

Alphabet

The Russian alphabet is as follows:

The consonant letters represent both as "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ⟨ʲ⟩) and "hard" consonant phonemes. If a consonant letter is followed by a vowel letter, then the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is meant to follow "hard" consonants ⟨а, о, э, у, ы⟩ or "soft" ones ⟨я, Ñ', е, ÑŽ, и⟩; see below. A soft sign indicates ⟨Ь⟩ 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: /ʐ/, /Ê‚/ and /tÍ¡s/ are always hard; /j/, /ɕː/ and /tÍ¡É•/ are always soft. See Russian phonology for details.

^† An alternate form of the letter El (Л л) closely resembles the Greek letter for lambda (Λ λ).

Frequency

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

Non-vocalized letters

• The hard sign (⟨ъ⟩), when put after a consonant, acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding iotated vowel from the consonant, making that sound with a distinct /j/ glide. Today it is used mostly to separate a prefix from the following root. Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, /Å­/ but likely pronounced [É™] or [ɯ]. Until the 1918 reform, no written word could end in a consonant: those that end in a ("hard") consonant in modern orthography had then a final ÑŠ.
• The soft sign (⟨ь⟩) acts like a "silent front vowel" and indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized. This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian. For example, брат [brat] ('brother') contrasts with брать [bratʲ] ('to take'). The original pronunciation of the soft sign, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short fronted reduced vowel /Ä­/ but likely pronounced [ɪ] or [jɪ]. There are still some remnants of this ancient reading in modern Russian, in the co-existing versions of the same name, read differently, such as in Марья and Мария (Mary).

Vowels

The vowels ⟨е, Ñ', и, ÑŽ, я⟩ indicate a preceding palatalized consonant and with the exception of ⟨и⟩ are iotated (pronounced with a preceding /j/) when written at the beginning of a word or following another vowel (initial ⟨и⟩ 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, ⟨е⟩ may be used in words of foreign origin without palatalization (/e/), and ⟨я⟩ is often realized as [æ] between soft consonants, such as in мяч ("toy ball").

⟨ы⟩ 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: камы [ˈka.mɨ̃]; камень [ˈka.mʲɪnʲ] ("rock"). Its written form developed as follows: ⟨ъ⟩ + ⟨і⟩ â†' ⟨ъı⟩ â†' ⟨ы⟩.

⟨э⟩ was introduced in 1708 to distinguish the non-iotated/non-palatalizing /e/ from the iotated/palatalizing one. The original usage had been ⟨е⟩ for the uniotated /e/, ⟨ѥ⟩ or ⟨ѣ⟩ for the iotated, but ⟨ѥ⟩ had dropped out of use by the sixteenth century. In native Russian words, ⟨э⟩ is found only at the beginnings of words or in compound words (e.g. поэтому "therefore" = по + этому). In words that come from foreign languages in which iotated /e/ is uncommon or nonexistent (such as English, for example), ⟨э⟩ is usually written in the beginning of words and after vowels except ⟨и⟩ (e.g. поэт, poet), and ⟨е⟩ after ⟨и⟩ and consonants. However, the pronunciation is inconsistent. Many words, especially monosyllables, words ending in ⟨е⟩ and many words where ⟨е⟩ follows ⟨т⟩, ⟨д⟩, ⟨н⟩, ⟨с⟩, ⟨з⟩ or ⟨р⟩ are pronounced with /e/ without palatalization or iotation: секс (seks â€" "sex"), проект (proekt â€" "project") (in this example, the spelling is etymological but the pronunciation is counteretymological). But many other words are pronounced with /ʲe/: секта (syekta â€" "sect"), дебют (dyebyut â€" "debut"). Proper names are usually not concerned by the rule (Сэм â€" "Sam", Пэмела â€" "Pamela", Мао Цзэдун â€" "Mao Zedong"); the use of ⟨э⟩ after consonants is common in East Asian names and in English names with the sounds /æ/ and /ɛər/, with some exceptions such as Ð"жек ("Jack") or Шепард ("Shepard"), since both ⟨э⟩ and ⟨е⟩ are not palatalized in cases of же ("che") or ше ("she"), yet in writing ⟨е⟩ usually prevails.

⟨Ñ'⟩, introduced by Karamzin in 1797 and made official in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education, marks a /jo/ sound that has historically developed from /je/ under stress, a process that continues today. The letter ⟨Ñ'⟩ is optional (in writing, not in pronunciation): it is formally correct to write ⟨e⟩ for both /je/ and /jo/. None of the several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the use of ⟨Ñ'⟩ have stuck.

Letters eliminated in 1918

Letters in disuse by 1750

⟨ѯ⟩ and ⟨ѱ⟩ derived from 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.

⟨ѡ⟩ is the Greek letter omega, identical in pronunciation to ⟨о⟩, used in secular writing until the eighteenth century, but to the present day in Church Slavonic, mostly to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise written identically.

⟨ѕ⟩ corresponded to a more archaic /dz/ 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.

The yuses ⟨ѫ⟩ and ⟨ѧ⟩, letters that originally used to stand for nasalized vowels /õ/ and /ẽ/, 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 script. The letters ⟨ѭ⟩ and ⟨ѩ⟩ had largely vanished by the twelfth century. The uniotated ⟨ѫ⟩ 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 ⟨ѫ⟩ and ⟨ѧ⟩ (see next note) survives in contemporary Church Slavonic, and the sounds (but not the letters) in Polish.

The letter ⟨ѧ⟩ was adapted to represent the iotated /ja/ ⟨я⟩ in the middle or end of a word; the modern letter ⟨я⟩ is an adaptation of its cursive form of the seventeenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708.

Until 1708, the iotated /ja/ was written ⟨ıa⟩ at the beginning of a word. This distinction between ⟨ѧ⟩ and ⟨ıa⟩ survives in Church Slavonic.

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 letters ⟨з⟩ (replaced by ⟨ѕ⟩), ⟨и⟩, and ⟨ф⟩ (the diacriticized letter ⟨й⟩ was also removed), but were reinstated except ⟨ѱ⟩ and ⟨ѡ⟩ 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 ⟨ѕ⟩, ⟨ѯ⟩, and ⟨ѵ⟩; however, ⟨ѵ⟩ was sometimes used again since 1758.

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 [h], there are a number of common words (particularly proper nouns) borrowed from languages like English and German that contain such a sound in the original language. In well-established terms, such as галлюцинация [ɡəlʲutsɨˈnatsɨjə] ('hallucination'), this is written with ⟨г⟩ and pronounced with /ɡ/ while newer terms use ⟨х⟩, pronounced with /x/, such as хобби [ˈxobʲɪ] ('hobby').

Similarly, words originally with [θ] in their source language are either pronounced with /t(ʲ)/), as in the name Тельма ('Thelma') or, if borrowed early enough, with /f(ʲ)/ or /v(ʲ)/, as in the names ФÑ'дор ('Theodore') and Матве́й ('Matthew').

Numeric values

The numerical values correspond to the Greek numerals, with ⟨ѕ⟩ being used for digamma, ⟨ч⟩ for koppa, and ⟨ц⟩ 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.

Diacritics

Russian spelling uses fewer diacritics than those used for most European languages. 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. Although Russian word stress is often unpredictable and can fall on different syllables in different forms of the same word, this diacritic is only used in special cases: in dictionaries, children's books, language-learning resources, or on minimal pairs distinguished only by stress (for instance, за́мок 'castle' vs. замо́к 'lock'). Rarely, it is used to specify the stress in uncommon foreign words and in poems where unusual stress is used to fit the meter. Unicode has no code points for the accented letters; they are instead produced by suffixing the unaccented letter with U+0301 ◌́ combining accute accent.

The letter ⟨Ñ'⟩ is a special variant of the letter ⟨е⟩, which is not always distinguished in written Russian, but the umlaut-like sign has no other uses. Stress on this letter is never marked, as it is always stressed, except in some loanwords.

Unlike the case of ⟨Ñ'⟩, the letter ⟨й⟩ has completely separated from ⟨и⟩. It has been used since the 16th century, 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.

Keyboard layout

The standard Russian keyboard layout for PC computers is as follows:

However, there are several choices of so-called "phonetic keyboards" that one may use on a PC that are often used by non-Russians. For example, typing an English (Latin) letter on a keyboard will actually type a Russian letter with a similar sound (A-A,O-O,F-Ф,...). See virtual keyboard and Russian keyboard layout (Wikipedia).

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 great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: "The letters constituting the Slavonic alphabet do not produce any sense. Аз, буки, веди, глаголь, добро 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:

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") doesn't mean "the Universe", and "ферт" 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 â€" "червь" ("worm"), which, however, was not included in the "translation".

See also

• Russian cursive (handwritten letters)
• Russian orthography
• Reforms of Russian orthography
• Russian braille
• Russian manual alphabet
• Romanization of Russian
• Computer russification
• Russian phonology
• Cyrillic script
• Yoficator

Notes

References

Bibliography

• Ivan G. Iliev. Kurze Geschichte des kyrillischen Alphabets. Plovdiv. 2015. [1]
• Ivan G. Iliev. Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet. [2]
• Benson, Morton (1960), "Review of The Russian Alphabet by Thomas F. Magner", The Slavic and East European Journal, 4 (3): 271â€"72, doi:10.2307/304189 
• Dunn, John; Khairov, Shamil (2009), Modern Russian Grammar, Modern Grammars, Routledge 
• Halle, Morris (1959), Sound Pattern of Russian, MIT Press 
• Smirnovskiy, P (1915), A Textbook in Russian Grammar, Part I. Etymology (26th ed.), CA: Shaw 
• Vasmer, Max (1979), Russian Etymological Dictionary, Winter