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The Russian alphabet (, or , more traditionally) is the script used to write the
Russian language Russian is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic languages, Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is ...
. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty
consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
(, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ), ten
vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
(, , , , , , , , , ), a
semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are ''y ...
/ 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 The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
, which was invented in the 9th century to capture accurately the phonology of the first Slavic
literary language Literary language is the Register (sociolinguistics), register of a language used when writing in a formal, academic writing, academic, or particularly polite tone; when speaking or writing in such a tone, it can also be known as formal language. ...
,
Old Church Slavonic Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic ( ) is the first Slavic languages, Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic languages, South Slavic subgroup of the ...
. The
early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is an alphabetic writing system that was developed in Medieval Bulgaria in the Preslav Literary School during the late 9th century. It is used to write the Chur ...
was adapted to
Old East Slavic Old East Slavic (traditionally also Old Russian) was a language (or a group of dialects) used by the East Slavs from the 7th or 8th century to the 13th or 14th century, until it diverged into the Russian language, Russian and Ruthenian language ...
from Old Church Slavonic and was used in
Kievan Rus' Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus,. * was the first East Slavs, East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical At ...
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

: An alternative form of the letter De (Д д) closely resembles the Greek letter
delta Delta commonly refers to: * Delta (letter) (Δ or δ), the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet * D (NATO phonetic alphabet: "Delta"), the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet * River delta, at a river mouth * Delta Air Lines, a major US carrier ...
(Δ δ). : An alternative form of the letter El (Л л) closely resembles the Greek letter
lambda Lambda (; uppercase , lowercase ; , ''lám(b)da'') is the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced alveolar lateral approximant . In the system of Greek numerals, lambda has a value of 30. Lambda is derived from the Phoen ...
(Λ λ).


Historic letters


Letters eliminated in 1917–18

* — Identical in pronunciation to , it was used exclusively immediately before other vowels and the ("
Short I Short I or Yot/Jot (Й й; italics: ''Й й'' or ; italics: ) (sometimes called I Kratkoye, , Ukrainian: йот) or I with breve, Russian: и с бреве) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И wi ...
") (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
homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are either; '' homographs''—words that mean different things, but have the same spelling (regardless of pronunciation), or '' homophones''—words that mean different things, but have the same pronunciat ...
s). * 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 Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
theta Theta (, ) uppercase Θ or ; lowercase θ or ; ''thē̂ta'' ; Modern: ''thī́ta'' ) is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter Teth 𐤈. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 9. Gree ...
, it was identical to in pronunciation, but it was used etymologically (for example, "Theodore" became "Fyodor"). * ѵ — From the
Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
upsilon Upsilon (, ; uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; ''ýpsilon'' ) or ypsilon is the twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, has a value of 400. It is derived from the phoenician alphabet, Phoenician Waw (letter), waw ...
, usually identical to in pronunciation, as in
Byzantine Greek Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic; Greek: ) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the F ...
, 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 Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The ...
and Macedonian to the present day. * and derived from Greek letters xi and
psi Psi, PSI or Ψ may refer to: Alphabetic letters * Psi (Greek) (Ψ or ψ), the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet * Psi (Cyrillic), letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet, adopted from Greek Arts and entertainment * "Psi" as an abbreviat ...
. 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 Omega (, ; uppercase Ω, lowercase ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and last letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numerals, Greek numeric system/isopsephy (gematria), it has a value ...
, 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 In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . ...
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 Paschal is used as a name. Paschal, a variant of Pascal, from Latin ''Paschalis'', is an adjective describing either the Easter or Passover holidays. People known as Paschal include: Popes and religious figures * Antipope Paschal (687), a ri ...
tables. The seventeenth-century usage of and survives in contemporary Church Slavonic, and the sounds (but not the letters) 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 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 Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a su ...
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 The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC; ;), also officially known as the Moscow Patriarchate (), is an autocephaly, autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodox Christian church. It has 194 dioceses inside Russia. The Primate (bishop), p ...
in a later variant of the modern typeface (1710). Nonetheless, since 1735, the
Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation; and additional scientific and social units such ...
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 Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a su ...
as the
Anti-Christ In Christian eschatology, Antichrist (or in broader eschatology, Anti-Messiah) refers to a kind of entity prophesied by the Bible to oppose Jesus in Christianity, Jesus Christ and falsely substitute themselves as a savior in Christ's place before ...
.


Consonants

Most consonants can represent both "soft" ( palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ) 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 (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

The Russian alphabet contains 10 vowel letters. They are grouped into soft and hard vowels. The soft vowels, , either indicate a preceding
palatalized consonant In phonetics, palatalization (, ) or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the Internationa ...
, 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 ('toy ball').


Individual vowels

is an old
Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium BC through the 6th ...
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 ; Modern Russian ('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 'this (is) (m./f./n.)', 'these', 'what a', 'that way', 'sort of', and interjections like 'hey') or in compound words (e.g., 'therefore' = + , where is the dative case of ). 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., , '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: (''seks'' — 'sex'), (''model — 'model'), (''kafe'' — 'café'), (''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 In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is the nonstandard use of language that results from the overapplication of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a ...
that has become standard). But many other words are pronounced with : (''syekta'' — 'sect'), (''dyebyut'' — 'debut'). Proper names are sometimes written with after consonants: — 'Sam', — 'Pamela', — 'Mary', — '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 ('Jack') and ('Shannon'), since both and , in cases of ("zhe"), ("she") and ("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: — 'Betty', — 'Peter', — 'Lake Placid'. Pronunciation mostly remains unpalatalized, so — Russian rendering of the English name 'Peter' is pronounced differently from — is a colloquial Russian name of
Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...
. , 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" (, but not ) from a preceding consonant, invoking implicit
iotation In Slavic languages, iotation (, ) is a form of palatalization that occurs when a consonant comes into contact with the palatal approximant from the succeeding phoneme. The is represented by iota (ι) in the early Cyrillic alphabet and the Gre ...
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 In vascular plants, the roots are the plant organ, organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often bel ...
. 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 ('without name', which is pronounced ) and ('nameless', which is pronounced ). This spelling convention, however, is not applied with certain loaned prefixes such as in the word — , 'Pan-Islamism') and compound words (e.g., — , '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 ) and the following vowel (if present) is iotated (including in loans). 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 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 and ('Mary'). When applied after
stem Stem or STEM most commonly refers to: * Plant stem, a structural axis of a vascular plant * Stem group * Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Stem or STEM can also refer to: Language and writing * Word stem, part of a word respon ...
-final always-soft (, but not ) or always-hard (, but not ) 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., ('India ink', feminine) cf. ('flourish after a toast', masculine) — both pronounced ; *the imperative mood for some verbs; *the infinitives of some verbs (with ending); *the second person for non-past verbs (with 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 and
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
that contain such a sound in the original language. In well-established terms, such as ('hallucination'), this is written with and pronounced with , while newer terms use , pronounced with , such as ('hobby'). Similarly, words originally with in their source language are either pronounced with , as in the name (' Thelma') or, if borrowed early enough, with or , as in the names (' Theodore') and (' Matthew'). For the
affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...
, which is common in the Asian countries that were part of the
Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...
and the
USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, the letter combination is used: this is often transliterated into English either as or the Dutch form .


Numeric values

The numerical values correspond to the
Greek numerals Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, is a numeral system, system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal number (linguistics), ordi ...
, with being used for
digamma Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an Archaic Greek alphabets, archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6 (number), 6. Whe ...
, for koppa, and for
sampi Sampi (modern: ϡ; ancient shapes: , ) is an Archaic Greek alphabets, archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It was used as an addition to the classical 24-letter alphabet in some eastern Ionic Greek, Ionic dialects of ancient Greek in the 6th a ...
. 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 Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The ...
, while general Russian texts use Indo-Arabic numerals and
Roman numerals Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, eac ...
.


Diacritics

The Cyrillic alphabet and Russian spelling generally employ fewer
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s than those used in other European languages written with the Latin alphabet. The only diacritic, in the proper sense, is the
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
  (Russian: 'mark of stress'), which marks stress on a vowel, as it is done in Spanish and Greek. (
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
has no
code point A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...
s 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 The Russian Wikipedia () is the Russian language, Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. As of , it has :ru:Special:Statistics, articles. It was started on 11 May 2001. In October 2015, it became the sixth-largest Wikipedia by the number of ar ...
, or on
minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate t ...
s distinguished only by stress (for instance, 'castle' vs. '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
corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of ...
of written Russian was found to be as follows:


Keyboard layout

Microsoft Windows
keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...
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 A mnemonic device ( ), memory trick or memory device is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval in the human memory, often by associating the information with something that is easier to remember. It makes use of e ...
names inherited from
Church Slavonic Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The ...
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 Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin () was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era.Basker, Michael. Pushkin and Romanticism. In Ferber, Michael, ed., ''A Companion to European Romanticism''. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. He is consid ...
wrote: "The ames of theletters that make up the Slavonic alphabet don't represent a meaning at all. ', ', ', ', ' 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: 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, "" ("rest" or "apartment") does not mean "the Universe", and "" 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 — "" ("worm"), which, however, was not included in the "translation".


See also

*
Bulgarian alphabet The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet () is used to write the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. It has been used in Bul ...
* Computer russification *
Cyrillic alphabets Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Saints Cyril and Methodius, Cyril and Methodi ...
*
Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
*
Ukrainian Latin alphabet The Ukrainian Latin alphabet is the form of the Latin script used for writing, transliteration, and retransliteration of Ukrainian. The Latin alphabet has been proposed or imposed several times in the history in Ukraine, but it has never repl ...
*
Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...
*
Montenegrin alphabet The Montenegrin alphabet is the collective name given to "" ( Montenegrin Latin alphabet; in Cyrillic) and "" ( Montenegrin Cyrillic alphabet; in Latin), the writing systems used to write the Montenegrin language. It was adopted on 9 June 2009 b ...
*
List of Cyrillic digraphs and trigraphs The following multigraphs are used in the Cyrillic script. The palatalized consonants of Russian and other languages written as C- are mostly predictable and therefore not included here unless they are irregular. Likewise, in the languages of ...
*
Reforms of Russian orthography Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries. Early changes Old East ...
*
Romanization of Russian The romanization of the Russian language (the transliteration of Russian text from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script), aside from its primary use for including Russian names and words in text written in a Latin alphabet, is also essentia ...
*
Russian Braille Russian Braille is the braille alphabet of the Russian language. With suitable extensions, it is used for languages of neighboring countries that are written in Cyrillic alphabets, Cyrillic in print, such as Ukrainian language, Ukrainian and Mon ...
*
Russian cursive Russian cursive is a variant of the Russian alphabet used for writing by hand. It is typically referred to as ''(rússky) rukopísny shrift'', "(Russian) handwritten font". It is the handwritten form of the modern Russian Cyrillic script, us ...
(handwritten letters) * Russian manual alphabet * Russian Morse code *
Russian orthography Russian orthography () is an orthography, orthographic tradition formally considered to encompass spelling ( rus, орфогра́фия, r=orfografiya, p=ɐrfɐˈɡrafʲɪjə) and punctuation ( rus, пунктуа́ция, r=punktuatsiya, p=p ...
*
Russian phonology This article discusses the phonology, phonological system of standard language, standard Russian language, Russian based on the Moscow dialect (unless otherwise noted). For an overview of dialects in the Russian language, see Russian dialects. Mo ...
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Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic Scientific transliteration, variously called ''academic'', ''linguistic'', ''international'', or ''scholarly transliteration'', is an international system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script (romanization). Th ...
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Serbian Cyrillic alphabet The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (, ), also known as the Serbian script, (, ), is a standardized variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language. It originated in medieval Serbia and was significantly reformed in the 19th cen ...
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Yoficator A yoficator or joficator () is a computer program or extension for a text editor that restores the Cyrillic letter Yo ⟨⟩ in Russian texts in places where the letter Ye ⟨⟩ was used instead. The majority of Russian newspapers and publishe ...


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References


Bibliography

*Ivan G. Iliev
"Kurze Geschichte des kyrillischen Alphabets"
Plovdiv. 2015. *Ivan G. Iliev

* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Russian Alphabet
Alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
Cyrillic alphabets
Alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
de:Kyrillisches Alphabet#Russisch